How decades of policy failures created Bangladesh’s power crisis

This month Bangladesh's energy shortfall peaked above 3,500 megawatts in a single day, and rural households are enduring 10 to 12 hours without electricity — worse than the fuel shock that followed the Iran war in March, and worse than it was under the interim government that came before. 

The numbers are no longer in dispute. They are in government reports, parliamentary disclosures and the findings of Bangladesh's own National Review Committee. 

Between 2018 and 2025, Bangladesh spent $17.6 billion importing liquefied natural gas (LNG) — one and a half times the country's entire annual domestic gas output. Yet its own onshore discovery at Bhola North sat stranded for lack of a single pipeline. Bangladesh drilled roughly 100 exploration wells in 50 years, compared with India's 545 oil and gas wells during the 2017–18 financial year alone. This is not scarcity. It is neglect, quantified.

Consider the Adani Godda contract. In 2023, Bangladesh paid Tk14.02 per unit for power imported from a plant in Jharkhand, while the same power was available on India's power exchange that year for Tk7.83 — a 79% premium. The National Review Committee's final report, issued this January, found that the deal carried a 39.7% premium over Bangladesh's next-best available contract and that the arrangement alone raised the country's national average tariff by 7.69%. One contract, signed in 2017 without public disclosure of its terms, is now quietly embedded in every electricity bill in the country.

Or consider the idle capacity. As of this year, 7,700 to 9,500 megawatts of power that Bangladesh has already paid for sits unused — some of it excess capacity the country never needed, some of it capacity that cannot be dispatched at all because the fuel or grid connection is not available. Bangladesh built power plants first and transmission lines second, and the bill for that sequencing error runs to roughly a billion dollars a year in carrying costs alone.

The clearest single symbol of this failure is Rooppur: a nuclear plant now approaching full operation, generating power at roughly Tk10 per unit — half the cost of the oil-fired plants still running to meet Dhaka's demand — because the transmission line needed to carry Rooppur's power into the capital has not been finished. Cheaper power exists. It cannot reach the people who need it.

Meanwhile, the sun that falls on Bangladesh every day, for more than 250 days a year, remains almost entirely unused. Pakistan, sharing comparable geography and grid challenges, built 34,000 megawatts of rooftop solar capacity in under three years after removing import duties and replacing a 47-day manual approval process with a seven-day automatic one. 

Bangladesh's total installed solar capacity, after decades, stands at 1,323 megawatts — roughly 4% of Pakistan's, achieved at a fraction of Pakistan's pace, for no reason that geology or climate can explain. The difference between the two countries is not sunlight. It is paperwork — and the political will to remove it.

As of this year, 7,700 to 9,500 megawatts of power that Bangladesh has already paid for sits unused — some of it excess capacity the country never needed, some of it capacity that cannot be dispatched at all because the fuel or grid connection is not available. Bangladesh built power plants first and transmission lines second, and the bill for that sequencing error runs to roughly a billion dollars a year in carrying costs alone.

None of this is news to Bangladesh's own scientists. Bangladesh's geologists have said plainly for years that the country remains among the least explored of the world's most promising gas basins, and that the discovery of one field raises the odds of finding the next. The country's own drilling record — 18 exploration wells and four new discoveries in the 12 years to 2025 — does not reflect that logic.

When scientists warn a country about the resources beneath its own land, but those warnings are ignored for a generation, that is not a technical failure. It is a failure of governance. And ordinary people pay the price: households pay higher electricity bills because of costly contracts; workers are sent home when power cuts could have been prevented; and families cannot afford solar panels because of high import duties.

Bangladesh's proven gas reserves, at current rates of use, will not last past the early 2030s. The government's own estimates place the range between 2033 and 2040 — a spread that itself says something about how carefully the position has been tracked. That is not a distant, abstract future. It falls within the working life of everyone, and within the term of whichever government is in office when the number reaches zero.

The offshore round now underway, the appraisal wells being drilled in places like Noakhali, and the overdue transmission investment are steps in the right direction. But they arrive 10, 15 or 20 years after the point at which sustained investment could have avoided the crisis entirely, and they do not undo the money already spent avoiding the harder, better choice.

There is a version of the last decade in which Bangladesh spent its LNG bill, or even a fraction of it, on the domestic solar and wind capacity its geography makes freely available, on the exploration drilling its own scientists were asking for, and on the grid infrastructure needed to move power to where people live. That version was affordable. It was technically straightforward. Every element of it has been demonstrated at scale by a neighbouring country. It was not chosen.

Citizens do not owe their government patience for a crisis manufactured by decisions they had no part in making. They deserve an honest accounting of how the country arrived here, a specific plan for what changes next, and a government that treats the next decade's energy choices with the urgency that the last three decades' choices so plainly lacked. 

The only question left is whether this generation of decision-makers will finally do the arithmetic that ordinary Bangladeshi families have been doing, unfairly, every evening for years.

Dr Ahad Chowdhury is a PhD geologist and environmental scientist, and a member of the Bangladesh Environment Network.