Tender for Bakun submarine cable in 3 months time

Friday November 6, 2009By JACK WONG

KUCHING: The open international tender for the proposed submarine cable project to transmit electricity from Bakun hydro dam in Sarawak to Peninsular Malaysia is expected to be called in three months. Sarawak Hidro Sdn Bhd managing director Zulkifle Osman said a German consultant was now helping the special purpose vehicle set up by the Tenaga Nasional Bhd-Sarawak Energy Bhd consortium to prepare the tender documents. Sarawak Hidro, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Finance Ministry Inc, is the dam’s developer and manager.

Zulkifle said submission for the tender was expected to close in August next year. The tenders are for the fabrication and laying of cables across the South China Sea. “The first of the two submarine cables is expected to be completed by 2016 and the second a year later,’’ Zulkifle told a media briefing on the Bakun project here on Wednesday night, adding that each of the two submarine cables would transmit 800MW.

He said the actual route for the laying of the undersea cables, from Tanjung Pueh, Sematan in Sarawak to the southernmost tip in Johor, had yet to be determined. The cables, ranging from 670km to 700km, have to go through Indonesian waters.

The Bakun electricity will first be transferred through Syarikat Sesco Bhd lines to Bintulu and then Kuching before being linked to the submarine cables. Syarikat Sesco is a wholly-owned subsidiary of listed Sarawak Energy Bhd. The company was formerly known as Sarawak Electricity Supply Corp before it was privatised in July 2005.

Zulkifle said the dam, which has an installed capacity of 2,400MW, would be fully operational by 2011. The first of the dam’s eight turbines, which could each generate 300MW, is expected to be commissioned in October or November next year. However, he said the amount of electricity to be generated from Bakun initially would depend on the demand as Sarawak now have an excess of some 200MW.

Power from Bakun is also expected to be exported to neighbouring Brunei.
Zukifle said the dam’s civil as well as electrical and mechanical packages were more than 90% completed.

He added that the project’s actual development cost had not been determined, noting that Sarawak Hidro has not fully utilised the RM4.3bil it had borrowed to finance the Bakun dam construction.