http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/19/world/middleeast/19electricity.html
December 19, 2006
Iraq Insurgents Starve Capital of Electricity
By JAMES GLANZ
BAGHDAD, Dec. 18 . Over the past six months, Baghdad has been all but
isolated electrically, Iraqi officials say, as insurgents have
effectively
won their battle to bring down critical high-voltage lines and cut
off the
capital from the major power plants to the north, south and west.
The battle has been waged in the remotest parts of the open desert,
where
the great towers that support thousands of miles of exposed lines are
frequently felled with explosive charges in increasingly determined
and
sophisticated attacks, generally at night. Crews that arrive to
repair the
damage are often attacked and sometimes killed, ensuring that the
government falls further and further behind as it attempts to
repair the
lines.
And in a measure of the deep disunity and dysfunction of this
nation, when
the repair crews and security forces are slow to respond, skilled
looters
often arrive with heavy trucks that pull down more of the towers to
steal
as much of the valuable aluminum conducting material in the lines as
possible. The aluminum is melted into ingots and sold.
What amounts to an electrical siege of Baghdad is reflected in
constant
power failures and disastrously poor service in the capital, with
severe
consequences for security, governance, health care and the mood of an
already weary and angry populace.
.Now Baghdad is almost isolated,. Karim Wahid, the Iraqi electricity
minister, said in an interview last week. .We almost don.t have any
power
coming from outside..
That leaves Baghdad increasingly dependent on a few aging power plants
within or near the city.s borders.
Mr. Wahid views the situation as dire, while Western officials in
Baghdad
are generally more optimistic.
Mr. Wahid said that last week, seven of the nine lines supplying power
directly to Baghdad were down, and that just a trickle of
electricity was
flowing through the two others. Western officials agreed that most
of the
lines were down, but gave somewhat higher estimates on the electricity
that was still flowing.
.There.s quite a few that are down, and that does limit our ability to
import power into Baghdad,. said a senior Western official with
knowledge
of the Iraqi grid. .The goal and the objective is to get them up as
quickly as we can..
Mr. Wahid said he has appealed both to American and Iraqi security
forces
for help in protecting the lines, but has had little response;
Electricity
Ministry officials said they could think of no case in which
saboteurs had
been caught. Payments made to local tribes in exchange for security
have
been ineffective, electricity officials said.
Neither the Defense Ministry nor the American military responded to
requests for comment on the security of the lines.
In response to the crisis, Mr. Wahid has formulated a national
emergency
master plan that in its first stage involves bringing some 100
diesel-powered generators directly into Baghdad neighborhoods by next
summer. That would be followed by the construction of a spate of
new power
plants in Baghdad and major work on existing ones.
All together, Mr. Wahid estimates, the program would cost $27
billion over
10 years, although some electricity experts knowledgeable about the
plan
say that even under optimistic assumptions, those enormous
expenditures
would not bring electrical supplies in line with demand before 2009.
.I don.t know how the people in Iraq are going to accept that
reality,.
said Ghazwan al-Mukhtar, an Iraqi electrical engineer who recently
left
the country because of the security situation, .that after five
years, six
years, they are still suffering from a lack of electricity..
The reason that the attacks on the high-voltage electrical lines,
known as
400-kilovolt lines, have been especially devastating is that they
serve as
the arterial roads of the national grid, the gargantuan electrical
circuit
that was designed to carry power from the energy-rich north and
south to
the great population center in Baghdad.
Throughout the country, there are perhaps 15 particularly critical
400-kilovolt lines, carried by their unmistakable 150-foot towers. The
entire network runs for 2,500 miles, often passing through uninhabited
desert, said Fouad Monsour Abbo, the assistant director for
transmission
in the Electricity Ministry.
Statistics maintained by the ministry over this year chronicle the
dissolution of sections of the grid and the gradual isolation of
Baghdad.
In March, at most one or two of the lines were severed at any one
time,
but by the summer the typical number had risen to six or seven and had
soared to a peak of 12 by early fall. Electricity officials say the
decisive moment came July 6, when saboteurs mounted coordinated
attacks
across the country, gaining a lead in the battle that the
government has
not been able to reverse.
.They targeted all the lines at the same time, and they all came
down,.
Mr. Abbo said.
Mr. Abbo said a typical strategy was to set off explosives at the four
support points of a single tower, which would then pull down two or
three
more towers as it toppled. As repair crews moved in hours or days
later,
another tower farther up the line might be struck, and then
another, in a
race the government had little chance of winning.
On Sunday, Mr. Abbo recited the most recent measures of the
devastation.
That day, 40 towers were down on a line running to Baghdad from one
of the
nation.s largest power plants in Baiji, in the insurgent-ridden
north, and
42 more towers were down on a line connecting Baiji to a huge power
plant
in Kirkuk.
Towers were also down on two lines that pass through the .triangle of
death. to connect Baghdad with a power plant to the south in
Musayyib, and
on four other lines in the Baghdad area or its environs. And the
city was
entirely cut off from the huge hydroelectric dam at Haditha, to the
west
in Anbar Province, the homeland of the Sunni insurgency.
Even the destruction of one tower generally shuts down a line.
.All the transfer lines are in hot spots and are targeted by terrorist
attacks,. said Saadi Mehdi Ali, who as the Electricity Ministry.s
inspector general follows the issue closely.
The attacks have an immediate impact on the lives of ordinary
Iraqis. Last
week even the official United States State Department figures,
which many
Iraqis contend lean toward the optimistic side, said there was an
average
of 6.6 hours of electricity per day in Baghdad and 8.9 hours
nationwide.
Before the war, Baghdad had 16 to 24 hours of power and the rest of
Iraq 4
to 8 hours, according to the Special Inspector General for Iraq
Reconstruction, an independent United States federal office. While the
redistribution has always been cast by American officials as a
deliberate
reversal of Saddam Hussein-era inequities, the statistics revealing
the
isolation of Baghdad show that the government no longer has much
choice
about the amount of power to direct to the city.
Also included in Mr. Wahid.s master plan is a centralized, automated
control system to move that electricity around what is now an
antiquated
grid run by engineers who manually throw switches at power stations
and
substations scattered around the country. The control system would
also
help stabilize a grid that is increasingly unstable and prone to
large-scale blackouts . and make deliberate manipulation of the
electricity supply harder.
Iraqi and American officials say another reason that the amount of
electricity in Baghdad is down is that power-rich areas like
southern Iraq
are finding ways to work their switches to keep more of the
electricity
they generate for themselves.
.That.s a fact of life,. said a senior Western official who would
not be
quoted by name. But with the plans for a control system, the official
said, .it is becoming less and less of an issue..
The combination of factors draining the city of electricity is
reflected
in a separate set of figures that gauge the electricity on the so-
called
.Baghdad ring. of power lines. Those figures reached a peak of 1300
megawatts in early June and had dropped to 800 megawatts by
November. It
rebounded slightly to 890 megawatts this month. In contrast, current
demand within the Baghdad ring is estimated at 2000 megawatts and
growing.
As Baghdad relies increasingly on aging local plants to satisfy the
bulk
of its demand, Iraqi officials say that poor decisions in the
American-financed reconstruction program have made those plants
much less
effective than they could be.
For example, the Qudis plant, just north of Baghdad, was outfitted
with
turbine generators modeled on 747 airplane engines that work
efficiently
only when using fuel of higher quality than the Iraqis can provide
with
any regularity, a fact that has led to damaging breakdowns.
But there have also been important successes, including the
installation
of two enormous new turbines by the American contractor Bechtel at the
Baghdad South power plant on the banks of the Tigris River. Without
the
approximately 200 megawatts generated by the turbines, which were
transported under heavy security across the perilous Anbar desert to
Baghdad in 2004, basic services in the city could be verging on
desperate
by now.
.It is a battle,. said Mr. Abbo of the Electricity Ministry. .But
we still
have hope..
