Baghdad – Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, while standing by his resigning minister of electricity Karim Wahid, blamed the latter for raising people’s expectations and promising quick solutions to the electricity problems. The truth is, he said, the situation will not improve until the projects to build new power plants and install turbines contracted from GE and Siemens are done within two years. But would they?
Maliki is committing the same mistake of making promises neither he nor any other prime minister who will succeed him can realistically deliver on. The fact is Iraq does not currently have the means to finance the dozen or so power plants planned nor does it have the gas feedstock ready to supply them.
Political bickering in the previous parliament was one of the reasons behind the delays in securing financing for the GE and Siemens contracts, put at some $5 billion. Another has to do with planning within the ministry of electricity and the delays in tendering for the construction of power plants to house the newly-bought modern turbines, which was only launched this year.
Similarly, the ministry of oil did not make the gas supply issue a priority in the last few years and only now has started pushing for awarding non-associated gas fields to foreign companies and concluding a long-awaited deal with Royal Dutch Shell for the capture of associated gas being flared for years. Some 600-700 million cubic feet of gas, roughly equivalent to half of Iraq’s gas production, has and is being burnt every day. That volume of gas is enough to generate about 2500 MW per day of electricity or about one third of current supply by the national grid. Current demand is estimated at some 13,000-14,000 MW/d and is rising exponentially.
The latest developments shed the light on Iraq’s bitter fact; the lack of enough and sufficient brains to draw development plans and the political wrangling which reaches sometimes unjustified levels and derails the development.
And that should invite the next Iraqi government to change its way of thinking and running the country.
First, the next government should say: “Hey I have the money, but I can’t put effective plans on how to spend this money.” Here the government should hire well-known international consultant firms to help identifying the priorities and draw the plans.
Second, the next government should keep the development plans, as much as it can, away from the political infighting by creating councils which run by bureaucrats and experts who have nothing to do with all political parties.Their duties will be to identify the weakness and the needs in each field and then draw short, medium and long-term plans and oversee the implementation.
Third, there must be a serious and real fight against corruption. Any corrupt official must be brought in front of cameras, giving his full name and telling his own story. By this other corrupt officials will think more than one time before doing anything.
The main elements of the electricity system are:
1-Power Generation
2-Power lines transmissions
3-Power Distributions
Any discrepancy in any of the 3 above elements results in power disruption.
Iraq’s electrical woes have long been a source of discontent among the public, the decline of the electrical grid system began during the 1991 Gulf War, when it was targeted by U.S. warplanes. Facilities were further damaged during the 2003 invasion and the subsequent looting and insurgent attacks, coupled with rising demand, fuel shortages and provincial officials who are unplugging local power stations from the national grid system without coordination and cooperation between the provincial councils and the electricity officials resulted in unfair distribution of electricity problem; and was shaking people’s trust in Government officials.
Since the U.S. led invasion, all attempts at fixing the power supply crisis have failed and the effort foundered in the face of barely operating power plants suffering from years of neglect brought on by Saddam Hussein mismanagement, wars and U.N. trade sanctions. Power produced does not meet demand. Billions of dollars have been spent trying to fix the grid system since the 2003 invasion, but The lack of sufficient funding, which is part of the general situation in Iraq, bad planning and security have left the country with a dilapidated power grid that cannot come close to supplying the nation’s power needs; many Iraqis still get less than four hours of electricity per day — about the same or sometimes even less than they received under Saddam Hussein. With Iraqi families forced to spend more than $100 a month on private generators to make up for the frequent power outages. But many can’t afford the cost, leading some to steal electricity from other buildings and government offices, resulted in a chaos. Frustration has been heightened by the failure of Iraq’s politicians to form a new government more than three months after parliamentary elections.
The electricity problem in Iraq under the current circumstances is big for any Government and in spite, the government has had four years to build and rehabilitate the power stations, but apparently needs more time, and the Prime Minister is quite right in pledging people to be more patient; Yes, what is not tolerable is some officials made false promises; also the situation complicates efforts to stabilize the country as the U.S. military prepares to withdraw its forces by the end of next year; and delay in forming a new Government. I believe the Minister of electricity is a victim and deserve a plaudit to what he has done so far and the future will prove his positive achievement.