Iran's energy sector review

Iran increased nominal power generation capacity by 3% to around 78.9 GW during last fiscal year, ended on March 20, the statistics of Energy Ministry’s annual report indicate. The mentioned figure is nominal power generation, but the actual capacity stood at below 68.5 GW, which demonstrate that the country’s power plants suffer seriously from aging and exhaustion. During the last year Iran fulfilled only a half of the power generation growth plan, especially its renewable power projects are far behalf of plan. Iran needs at least 5 percent growth annually to avoid power outage in summers, when the electricity demand soars. The country added only 100MW to renewables last year, while it had planned to install 690 MW. Currently the renewables account for less than 0.5 percent of Iran’s total power generation capacity. Iran has planned to increase renewables by 5GW during 2016-2021, but currently the volume stands at 364MW in total and most of that was installed before 2016.

Iran’s petrochemical exports increased both in value and volume during the last Iranian fiscal year ending March 20, but the plants continue working with significant idle capacity, though the gap between nominal capacity and actual production has been narrowing. The National Petrochemical Company (NPC) released its annual report on April 22, saying that export of petrochemical products increased by about 10 percent in volume and 26 percent in value during last fiscal year. The significant difference between value and volume growth is due to rising oil and petrochemical prices. A 25 percent rise in world oil prices pushed petrochemical prices higher. The overall production also increased by 6 percent to 53.629 million metric tons (mt) last year. However, the figure is 2 million mt less than the projected plan for the year. On the other hand, about 16 percent of petrochemical production capacity remained idle. Source: NPC's Annual Report Unit:Million Metric Tons Until