15 September 2005

Iraqis Simmer as Demand Outstrips Electricity Supply

By James Glanz
New York Times
23 July 2005

ERBIL, Iraq - As the relentless summer heat in Iraq soars toward its August peak, electricity demand is roughly 25 percent higher than it was one year ago, while the supply to the nation's power grid is only slightly changed despite a $6 billion American program to rebuild the electrical infrastructure.

Those numbers, which come from the Iraqi Electricity Ministry, the American Embassy and the Pentagon, are being interpreted in widely varying ways by Iraqi and Western officials and the Iraqi citizens who rely on the electricity to run their refrigerators and air-conditioners.

The new electricity minister, Muhsin Shlash, believes that the losing battle with summer is an inevitable outcome of mistakes the Americans made early in the occupation, principally the decision to build numerous small generating stations instead of a few major plants.

Some American officials are acknowledging for the first time that their approach may have been flawed but put much of the blame on the decrepit state of the grid and a lack of help by the Iraqi government. Iraqi citizens appear to have slipped into a state of simmering resignation.

"We haven't seen any change in electricity supplies and we have programmed our lives to this situation," said Haydar al-Ameen, 35, an engineer whose office is in the Karada district of Baghdad. Power failures are constant, forcing residents to pay for power from jury-rigged neighborhood generators, Mr. Ameen said.

In this northern city, Ibrahim Muhammad, who runs a tiny take-out sandwich shop, said that the power was sometimes off during his entire prime sales time, from early morning to 11 a.m.

"It's not good," Mr. Muhammad said. "It's not comfortable for people coming here - hot!"

The constant power failures lead to a wide spectrum of other problems: patients who die in emergency rooms when equipment stops running, office elevators that are all but useless, and what amounts to a national epidemic of insomnia in sweltering Iraqi homes.

The rapid increase in demand is attributed to runaway sales of air-conditioners, refrigerators and other appliances after the fall of Saddam Hussein, who strictly regulated such sales, as well as some stirrings of economic growth.

As demand continues to rise, Iraqis remember promises by L. Paul Bremer, the top American administrator in the country until sovereignty passed to an Iraqi government in June 2004, that the power grid would be producing 6,000 megawatts of electricity a day by July of the same year. The grid is now producing around 5,000 megawatts, although it has been creeping up in recent weeks - a marginal increase that the Americans say is proof that their approach is paying off.

Current demand is running at about 8,200 megawatts, according to the American Embassy; before the invasion in 2003, the demand was more than 30 percent lower, the embassy said. Dr. Shlash, an electrical engineer who is receiving praise for some of his early moves even from the people he is criticizing, knows what he is up against in his new job.

"I always say I like a challenge," he said in an interview, "but up to a point."

A former electricity expert in Iraq who spent two decades in exile in Canada, Dr. Shlash was recruited for his job by Hussein al-Shahristani, the deputy speaker of the Iraqi National Assembly, who happens to be a nuclear physicist.

Dr. Shlash's earlier career at the Iraqi Electricity Ministry had thrived, Dr. Shahristani said, until the Baathists came to power and cleared the ministry of qualified engineers who would not join the party.

"As a result, he was not promoted within the ministry and he left Iraq after a while," Dr. Shahristani said.

A senior official at the American Embassy in Baghdad said of Dr. Shlash, "He goes back to a time when if you did your work and were technically competent, you moved up the next level." The official added, "He doesn't have any of the concerns about political parties or people's religious backgrounds."

Despite that praise from the Americans, Dr. Shlash is uncompromising in assessing the job he faces. Among his biggest challenges, he said, were problems created by mistakes he believed the Americans had made in their $6 billion electricity program.

He said that large amounts of the money, over half of which has been spent, had been scattered among countless small generators that often must be fueled with tanker trucks - a difficult task on the dangerous roads of Iraq - and on fixing outdated units instead of building new power plants that could have made a difference in the long run.

The Americans also made a crucial mistake, Dr. Shlash said, when they ignored Iraq's network of natural gas pipelines, which might have been used to fuel major power stations with a commodity that is plentiful in Iraq.

"In the end, these billions of taxpayer money," Dr. Shlash said of the enormous American effort, "you end up with a small percentage."

When told of Dr. Shlash's comments, a senior embassy official said "he's partially correct," but added that the United States had been under pressure since 2003 to show quick results on the grid, and so had not been able to build large power stations "that would have taken three or four years."

A background sheet distributed by the embassy acknowledges that questions have arisen over the expenditure of so much American money on the Iraqi grid. After describing that spending, the document asks, "So why is the Iraqi government still struggling to provide electricity for the Iraqi population?"

The explanation of "this paradox," the document says, lies in numerous factors, but two were called crucial: "The original planning had underestimated the decrepit state of Iraq's infrastructure, and it overestimated the management capabilities of the Iraqi Ministry of Electricity."

That shot across the Electricity Ministry's bow refers to earlier administrations, including the one led by Aiham Alsammarae, the previous minister. He returned from Chicago to work in the government of the former prime minister, Ayad Allawi, but Mr. Alsammarae's reign sank beneath accusations of corruption and incompetence. Still, the American criticism is likely to sting, and Dr. Shlash makes it clear that he intends to do business differently from his predecessors. Working with the Ministries of Oil and Water Resources, Dr. Shlash has already turned away from the strategy of relying solely on the Americans, negotiating agreements with Turkey and Syria to increase the amounts of electricity they send to Iraq. He hopes to work out similar agreements with Iran and Kuwait.

During the same negotiations, he and his colleagues also obtained an agreement to increase, although modestly, the amount of water flowing down the Euphrates River from Turkey and Syria into Iraq. The water will be used to push up the electricity generated by Iraq's hydroelectric dams, among other things.

Whether those measures can help Iraq's grid catch up with the surging demand for electricity is unclear. The latest figures from the embassy show demand reaching higher levels than at any time since the 2003 invasion, although ministry estimates do not show quite as steep an increase.

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Citation: James Glanz, "Iraqis Simmer as Demand Outstrips Electricity Supply," New York Times, 23 July 2005.
Original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/23/international/middleeast/23electricity.html?ei=5070&en=8d308cd7e78f30ab&ex=1122782400&emc=eta1&pagewanted=print

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