Amid the backdrop of all other coal-based power plants in the country, including India's Adani, the production of a unit of Payra Thermal Power Plant went into maintenance today.

The only full-phased coal-based plant will available at half of its 1,320 megawatts (MW) capacity for the next two months, according to the plant authorities.

They said, a 660MW unit of Payra Thermal Power Plant suspended production from 12:00am today.

With the new update, the power production with coal fired power plants dropped below 2,000MW, which was more than 3,000MW last week. The country's capacity to produce from coal plants is 7,099MW.

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Now coal power plants scaling back production

Manager of the plant Shah Abdul Mawla told The Daily Star that the production of the second unit of the Payra plant went into major maintenance which will take two months at least.

Once after the maintenance is completed, the full production might delay for another 20-25 days as another unit will require a regular maintenance then, he said.

The superintending engineer of this power plant Zobayer Ahmed said it is a scheduled maintenance which was delayed twice earlier considering the power demand of the country.

"But we got the clearance now," he said, adding that as winter started, power demand dropped.

Contacted, deputy assistant engineer of Patuakhali Power Grid Abdullah Al Naeem said they will not be facing any trouble in Patuakhali as power demand dropped at 45MW from 108MW for the last couple of days.

Currently, Bangladesh has been producing between 11,000MW to 12,000MW electricity, having around 500MW shortage during peak hours.