Power Grid In Iraq Far From Fixed

Electricity "is a huge issue in every province," said Mohammed Musabah, governor of Iraq's southern city of Basra, where riots broke out in the summer of 2003 to protest lengthy power cuts. Musabah gets a daily report on power production and frequent visits from Maytham Wasfi, assistant general director for power distribution for southern Iraq.

"We want people to understand," Wasfi said recently, "the situation of electricity this summer is going to be worse than last summer."

'A Rusty Old Car'

American expertise, Iraqi ingenuity and U.S. taxpayer dollars were supposed to have rapidly resurrected Iraq's electrical grid. What went wrong?

Even before the U.S. invasion, Iraq's power system did not produce enough power to meet demand, which ranged from 3,000 to 6,500 megawatts, depending on the weather. Before March 2003, average output was 4,400 megawatts, according to the Brookings' Iraq Index.

Former president Saddam Hussein drained power from other parts of the country to serve Baghdad. U.S. occupation authorities ordered that the burden be equally shared, and the routine almost everywhere has been three hours on, three hours off.

During the summer of 2003, U.S. officials spent about $230 million on emergency repairs and brought grid production back to around 3,500 megawatts. In the fall, they launched a campaign to increase output to 4,400 megawatts by midwinter, concentrating on repairs and purchasing spare parts. When that succeeded, they set a new goal: Reach 6,000 megawatts by June 1, 2004.

"The mantra was 'megawatts on the grid,' " recalled a senior U.S. Embassy official involved in reconstruction who could not be identified under embassy ground rules. "We didn't make it."

By this point, U.S. officials knew that they had initially failed to grasp how fragile the network was. Decades of poor maintenance, the U.S. bombing of Iraqi infrastructure in 1991, more than a dozen years of harsh economic sanctions and postwar looting in 2003 contributed to a state of severe dilapidation not fully recognized at first.

"It was like trying to restore a rusty old car on a farm some place," said the embassy official. "You repair it when you really should have started from scratch. But we didn't have the time or the money to do that."

It was a misjudgment that still bedevils the U.S. effort, according to the latest report on U.S. reconstruction delivered to Congress in April. The report said the "original estimate of the damage done to the basic infrastructure from decades of neglect and warfare was significantly underestimated," and as a result, "more time and resources are required to stand-up and maintain systems than originally thought."

Another major drag on increasing the grid's output has been insufficient fuel supplies. The favored fuels are either natural gas or diesel. But because Iraq does not produce enough diesel and has little natural gas, it has been substituting other fuels. The substitutes make generators less efficient. State Department figures released in mid-April, for example, indicate that nearly 1,000 megawatts are "currently offline in unplanned outages" and that 341 of those are "due to insufficient fuel supplies."

But perhaps the biggest constraint has been the insurgency, which Whitaker called "a big wet blanket that's thrown over the projects. It's a big decelerator." In a dramatic example, a huge, German-made 260-megawatt combustion turbine generator for Kirkuk power station sat in Jordan for at least six months until U.S. military and civilian officials could organize a convoy to bring it unscathed through insurgent territory.