It has become one of the most serious hurdles in the United States’s project to reshape Iraq: how can a force that spent billions sending its troops to war still not manage to keep the lights on?
Restoring electrical power is the cornerstone of the West’s reconstruction efforts. With electricity comes air conditioning in the summer, heating in winter, water purification facilities, revived oil and gas production, functioning hospitals and industrial plants back on line. All this will do more than any number of troops to restore security and halt the frustration behind the continued wave of guerrilla attacks.
Given the scale of the task, the architects of the US’s war appear remarkably untroubled. ”For a city that’s not supposed to have power, there’s lights all over the place. It’s like Chicago,” Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, said earlier this month after a night-time Blackhawk helicopter tour over Baghdad. Unfortunately, Chicago it is not.
Iraq’s current total power output is 3 362MW. That may not be far off the 4 000MW being produced just before the war, but it falls a long way short of today’s demand, estimated at between 7 000 and 20 000MW.
There is no quick fix, and no one understands why better than Zyad al-Azzawi. He is one of Iraq’s most respected power engineers. After the first Gulf War, the British-educated engineer was seconded to join the emergency reconstruction committee set up by Saddam Hussein to rebuild Iraq as quickly as possible. The task was colossal. Power stations and water plants had been destroyed. Yet within a few months Al-Azzawi and his fellow engineers rebuilt the stations, patched up the water plants and got the electricity back on line and the oil pumping again.
What happened next lies at the heart of the US’s current troubles: largely because United Nations sanctions there had been 12 years of maintenance shortcuts, spare-part shortages, crude patchwork repairs and pressure to squeeze as much power as possible from an ageing grid. Few major power stations were built over the decade, even though demand increased. This legacy of crippled infrastructure remains perhaps the biggest hurdle to the reconstruction efforts.
”Now you need to completely rehabilitate the power system,” says Al-Azzawi. This means that it will not be weeks or months but several years before a consistent power supply is established — and before other vital services, like healthcare and water purification, can be restored to their pre-1991 condition. Washington is at last experiencing for itself the impact of a decade of sanctions.
Many of today’s most serious problems have insignificant origins. A barely noticeable increase in water impurities, because of inefficient treatment plants, meant a growing problem of scaling in power station boiler plants. That means more frequent repairs, which reduces output.
Al-Azzawi and his colleagues were under pressure to increase the power supply after the first Gulf War and so Iraq’s power frequency was reduced from 50Hz to 49; this made little difference in people’s homes but it meant that turbines were operating under dangerous conditions. Other parts of the system are so old they simply can no longer take the strain. A fire in the Hartha power station in southern Iraq this month was blamed on a burned-out copper cable that was at least 25 years old. That one fire was enough to reduce by two-thirds the power that will be supplied in the province of Basra for at least a month.
But all cannot be blamed on poor infrastructure. During the 1991 rebuilding programme there was little looting. This time around, illicit street markets are filled with wires, cables, pipes, light bulbs, sockets, doors, brass fittings — anything looters could strip away. So much copper wire has been stolen and sold that it has dented world prices.
Corruption has plagued the oil industry and sabotage continues to be a problem. Power lines, particularly in the troubled Sunni regions north and north-west of Baghdad, are still frequently knocked down to disrupt supply.
Iraqi engineers are wary of rushing out to repair fallen pylons for fear of guerrilla attacks. Oil pipelines have been hit, and water pipes have also been targeted by sabateurs. Protecting the power lines and pipelines would require vast security operations. The same security concerns are also keeping many Western contractors and much-needed expatriate Iraqi businessmen away.
The US and Britain were culpably slow in realising the scale of the project. Initially, the task was given to military men: American Jay Garner and British Tim Cross. Only in mid-June did Washington and London wake up to the need to increase the power of what became the Coalition Provisional Authority, as well as its size and its experience.
Cross was replaced by Andy Bearpark, a British development expert who spent three years heading reconstruction efforts in Kosovo for the European Union. From his unassuming office (a walk-in closet off a guest bedroom in Saddam’s main Baghdad palace) Bearpark is leading the reconstruction effort. He insists it is unfolding faster than in any other post-conflict situation. Across Iraq thousands of small-scale, quick projects are under way, while the longer-term deals to repair power stations or build new ones are being negotiated.
Al-Azzawi and other Iraqi engineers believe the best solution would be to import enough generators to temporarily produce the hundreds of megawatts needed to fill the shortfall. Indeed, dozens of back-up generators have been installed at hospitals, water plants and telecoms exchanges. But to rely any more heavily on generators would require such a large supply of diesel fuel, Bearpark argues, as to be inefficient and impractical. Already there are serious diesel shortages. Some electricity is being imported from Syria and Turkey, but the restrictions of Iraq’s infrastructure limit how much can be absorbed.
In the end, there is no better option than simply to repair and strengthen the existing power grid, however long it takes (at least three years) and however much it costs (at least $10billion). ”People wanted it to be better straight away,” Bearpark says, ”but that is simply unachieveable.” Regardless of Rumsfeld’s bravado, it will be years before the lights stay on in Iraq. — Â