2023-07-29 16:39:06
In the middle of a scorching summer, a fire in an Iraqi power station on Saturday caused a widespread power outage in “all of Iraq”, announced the authorities, pledging to restore power “in the next few hours”.
The electricity file is extremely sensitive in Iraq, a country of 43 million inhabitants with immense wealth in hydrocarbons, but where the population lives with daily load shedding which worsens in the summer and is sometimes the cause of demonstrations.
“Total shutdown” in “all of Iraq”
“The electricity network experienced a total shutdown on Saturday at 12:40 p.m. due to a fire that affected a transmission station in Basra province,” the Ministry of Electricity said in a statement.
Ministry spokesman Ahmed Moussa confirmed to AFP that the outage affected “all of Iraq”. For his part, the Minister of Electricity Ziad Ali Fadel called in a press release for the formation of a “commission of inquiry” to “determine the causes of the fire” at the origin of the breakdown.
The incident caused “suspension of transmission lines” between the southern and central regions and shut down power plants, according to the ministry. “Rapid work is underway (…) to gradually restart the production plants and transmission lines”, adds this same source, specifying that the network will be “back to normal in the next few hours”.
Deteriorating infrastructure
In Iraq, crumbling infrastructure and failing public services bear witness to the decades of conflict that have plagued the country, but also to poor public management and endemic corruption.
To remedy the daily load shedding, most homes are subscribed to neighborhood generators that provide power. But not all families can afford such subscriptions – and this source of electricity is not always enough to run all the appliances, including air conditioners.
Each summer when the thermometer is close to 50 degrees in the capital or in the southern regions, load shedding gets worse. To say goodbye to chronic power cuts, Iraqi power plants should produce more than 32,000 megawatts (MW) every day, according to the authorities. This year, for the first time, the country has reached the threshold of 26,000 MW.
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