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Power Struggle    [

    Militias Seizing Control of Iraqi Electricity Grid
    By James Glanz and Stephen Farrell
    The New York Times

    Thursday 23 August 2007

    Baghdad - Armed groups increasingly control the antiquated switching stations that channel electricity around Iraq, the electricity minister said Wednesday.

    That is dividing the national grid into fiefs that, he said, often refuse to share electricity generated locally with Baghdad and other power-starved areas in the center of Iraq.

    The development adds to existing electricity problems in Baghdad, which has been struggling to provide power for more than a few hours a day because insurgents regularly blow up the towers that carry power lines into the city.

    The government lost the ability to control the grid centrally after the American-led invasion in 2003, when looters destroyed electrical dispatch centers, the minister, Karim Wahid, said in a news briefing attended also by United States military officials.

    The briefing had been intended, in part, to highlight successes in the American-financed reconstruction program here.

    But it took an unexpected turn when Mr. Wahid, a highly respected technocrat and longtime ministry official, began taking questions from Arab and Western journalists.

    Because of the lack of functioning dispatch centers, Mr. Wahid said, ministry officials have been trying to control the flow of electricity from huge power plants in the south, north and west by calling local officials there and ordering them to physically flip switches.

    But the officials refuse to follow those orders when the armed groups threaten their lives, he said, and the often isolated stations are abandoned at night and easily manipulated by whatever group controls the area.

    This kind of manipulation can cause the entire system to collapse and bring nationwide blackouts, sometimes seriously damaging the generating plants that the United States has paid millions of dollars to repair.

    Such a collapse took place just last week, the State Department reported in a recent assessment, which said the provinces' failure to share electricity resulted in a "massive loss of power" on Aug. 14 at 5 p.m.

    It added that "all Baghdad generation and 60 percent of national generation was temporarily lost." By midnight, half the lost power had been restored, the report said.

    With summer temperatures routinely exceeding 110 degrees, and demand soaring for air-conditioners and refrigerators, those blackouts deeply undermine an Iraqi government whose popular support is already weak.

    In some cases, Mr. Wahid and other Iraqi officials say, insurgents cut power to the capital as part of their effort to topple the government.

    But the officials said it was clear that in other cases, local militias, gangs and even some provincial military and civilian officials held on to the power simply to help their own areas.

    With the manual switching system in place, there is little that the central government can do about it, Mr. Wahid said.

    "We are working in this primitive way for controlling and distributing electricity," he said.

    Mr. Wahid said the country's power plants were not designed to supply electricity to specific cities or provinces. "We have a national grid," he said.

    He cited Mosul and Baquba, in the north, and Basra, in the south, as being among the cities refusing to route electricity elsewhere. "This greatly influenced the distribution of power throughout Iraq," Mr. Wahid complained.

    At times the hoarding of power provides cities around power plants with 24 hours of uninterrupted electricity, a luxury that is unheard of in Baghdad, where residents say they generally get two to six hours of power a day.

    Mr. Wahid said Baghdad was suffering mainly because the provinces were holding onto the electricity, but he said shortages of fuel and insurgents' strikes on gas and oil pipelines also contributed to the anemic output in the capital.

    Although a refusal by provincial governments to provide their full quotas to Baghdad could easily be seen as greedy when electricity is in such short supply, many citizens near the power plants regard the new reality as only fair; under Saddam Hussein, the capital enjoyed nearly 24 hours a day of power at the expense of the provinces that are now flush with electricity.

    Keeping electricity for the provinces, said Mohammed al-Abbasi, a journalist in Hilla, in the south, "is a reaction against the capital, Baghdad, as power was provided to it without any cuts during the dictator's reign."

    Other Iraqis are just grateful for anything that brings more comfort to their families and neighborhoods.

    "We support any step that provides us with power," said Ahmed Abdul Hussein, an ironsmith in Najaf, in the south.

    The precision with which militias control electricity in the provinces became apparent in Basra on May 25 when Moktada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army carried out a sustained attack against a small British-Iraqi base in the city center, and turned that control to tactical military advantage.

    "The lights in the city were going on and off all over," said Cpl. Daniel Jennings, 26, one of the British defenders who fought off the attack.

    "They were really controlling the whole area, turning the lights on and off at will. They would shut down one area of the city, turn it dark, attack us from there, and then switch off another one and come at us from that direction.

    "What they did was very well planned."

    The electricity briefing began with Brig. Gen. Michael J. Walsh, commanding general of the Gulf Region Division of the Army Corps of Engineers, saying the United States had finished more than 80 percent of the projects it planned for rehabilitating the Iraqi grid.

    He said that even though Baghdad now got no power from either the south or north, about a third of its electricity was still supplied by the national grid.

    But General Walsh said he knew people in Baghdad were far from satisfied.

    "I understand people's impatience," he said. "Certainly when you flip the light switch and nothing happens, you can get angry."

    -------

    Damien Cave contributed reporting from Baghdad, and Iraqi employees of The New York Times from Baghdad, Basra, Najaf, Hilla and Karbala.

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    Power Struggle
    By Larry Kaplow
    Newsweek

    Wednesday 22 August 2007

Iraq has been plagued by electrical shortages since the U.S. invasion, but the blackouts have gotten worse this summer. Besides decaying infrastructure and insurgent attacks, a bumbling bureaucracy and local power rebellions are to blame.

    Aug. 22, 2007 - Electricity output in Iraq has been slightly lower this summer than last year. For the fifth year since the 2003 invasion, Iraqis sweat out sleepless nights on their roofs, seeking to escape the heat inside their homes. They see food spoil in warm refrigerators and go without water as household electric pumps sit idle. Televisions can't be used to keep kids from going out into the dangerous streets. Those who can afford a generator or tap into a neighbor's can get power for as long as they can pay the increased prices of diesel fuel. Those who can't have seen their power cut to less than an hour a day at times.

    The electricity shortage is a major source of anger and disillusionment toward both the Iraqi government and the U.S. presence here. But much of the summer's shortfall is caused by bureaucratic snags that continue to stymie a plan for importing Kuwaiti diesel fuel-needed to power many government generators. An approximately $2.5 million dispute between government ministries and between Iraq and its southern neighbor is holding up what was supposed to be $150 million in imported diesel. Another self-inflicted wound to the country's electrical grid is even more disturbing and calls into question the entire viability of a unified Iraq. Electrical workers around the country, under the order of local officials or threats from rogue militias, are refusing to keep to national schedules for sharing power between the provinces. That not only deprives the capital of power, but causes systemwide shutdowns that sometimes damage the generators themselves.

    Throughout this hot summer there have been a series of what are basically power rebellions by local electrical workers against the national grid. The grid is supposed to juggle demand for the meager supply through schedules that spread the power around. In fact, U.S. engineers have been installing computerized systems designed to shift the power around without causing surges or dips that can damage equipment. But, according to Col. Michael Moon of the Gulf Region Division of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Iraqi technicians disconnect the computers as they try to keep energy in their local regions rather than share. Worst hit is the capital, where generators cannot meet even half the city's demand.

    And when one part of the grid fails to receive the power expected from another area, the equipment is rigged to shut off rather than risk damage. But it does not start right up again. At the sprawling Dora power plant last weekend, the six-story-high tangles of generators, coolers, pipes and ducts lay silent after what engineers said was a cut off from the night before. Much of the equipment is rebuilt with some of the more than $4 billion in U.S. tax money spent on the grid, and it is an impressive display of technology. The contrast is sharp between the shiny air ducts, compact control boxes and flowchart computer monitors on the new side and the leaking pipes and switchboard controls on the old wing. But the downed generators would take a day or more to bring back on line. In the end, a local power grab can reduce the supply for everyone.

    Military commanders say the ongoing shortages help fuel the insurgency. It stifles the economy. And outages have become emblematic of the new Iraq's broken promise. With reporters Tuesday, U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker cited the electrical chaos as a sign of the perils facing the weak central government, where ministers cannot even control their own employees amid the many other threats they face on the ground. Crocker has reconstruction staff in the provinces urging local officials to follow the national electrical scheme.

    But Moon says it's mainly the diesel shortage that has made the summer so miserable. Had the fuel come in as planned (while Iraq sits on one of the world's largest oil supplies, it cannot refine enough fuel to meet its own needs), there would have been more than 20 percent more generating power to go around, breaking records. But first, Kuwait balked over a debt of about $10 million it claimed was owed by Iraq's national oil company, Moon says. It took a couple of months for the government to pay it off and now there's a dispute over payments for the Kuwaiti companies with the tanker trucks. (The electricity minister claims the dispute was still over the original debt. A spokesman for the oil ministry, which does the importing, says the truckers were making unreasonable demands.)

    The week ending Aug. 14 was actually one of the best of the summer though it barely matched last year's levels. Baghdad averaged about seven hours of electricity a day and the rest of the country was up to nearly 11, according to the U.S. Department of State. A weekly State Department report shows how much power is actually supplied. Until last year, the graphic included a horizontal line along the pre-war level of about 97,000 megawatt hours per day. That is no longer shown. But the jagged lines show that power is still around that old level-occasionally nudging above and often dipping below. U.S. and Iraqi officials point out that demand has soared as Iraqis have bought new electronics. But while that can cut down the overall number of hours people have power, it does not explain the weak production. And, while it's true that U.S. and Iraqi efforts have greatly increased the capacity of the system by adding power plants, breakdowns, the fuel shortage and sabotage keep that capacity from ever being approached. So for all the new gear, production is still around pre-war levels.

    Security is the biggest problem. Electricity Minister Karim Wahid says about 1,100 of the ministry's 82,000 workers have been killed, wounded, kidnapped or fled the country over the past year alone. Workers often refuse to go make repairs in dangerous areas. Of the seven main feeder lines supplying Baghdad, only two were working Wednesday with sabotage having cut the other five. Meanwhile, Wahid faces the pressures of any politician. After a press conference Wednesday, a reporter tried to pin the minister down on just where he gets his own household power (he fudged a little, but like most ministers he would likely have a home generator and staff to run it).

    But for all the stats and averages and technicalities, Iraqis find ways to work around the anomalies. Priority locations, like fire stations, hospitals and water plants get fed 24-hour power, which can also cover the buildings immediately around them. Outside that zone, neighbors might get only two hours a day. That was the case for Mohammed al-Jafar, who tried to get by with a home generator but could not keep up with the $8-a-day fuel cost-he would only run the generator at night to cool the house while he slept. Then he met the doorman for a nearby apartment building, which was close enough to a water station to get all-day power. With most of the tenants having fled the city's dangers, the doorman allows neighbors to string wires onto the building's connection for about $41 a month and the occasional home-cooked meal. "It's perfect," said a happy al-Jafar, who can now watch television in a cool room. If only the people running the national grid could show that kind of cooperation.