Full electricity in Baghdad 6 years off (2013)

[maddezmom]

4.2 billion spent on key goal in fighting insurgency
By David Wood
Sun Reporter
Originally published March 2, 2007
WASHINGTON // Getting full-time electric power turned on in Baghdad, a key wartime goal toward which the United States has spent $4.2 billion dollars, won't be accomplished until the year 2013, U.S. officials said yesterday, in what others called a significant setback for the new U.S. initiatives to quell Iraq's bloody insurgency.

Power outages in the Iraqi capital are frequent, leaving residents without electricity for an average of 17 or 18 hours a day. For most residents without personal generators, that means not just no lights but dead radios and televisions, heaters, washing machines and water pumps.

Army Brig. Gen. Michael J. Walsh, the senior U.S. military officer overseeing reconstruction efforts, told reporters yesterday via video teleconference that the Iraq government plans to increase power generation "to catch up with demand" for electric power by 2013, "somewhere in around that area."

When President Bush announced in January that he was sending additional troops to Baghdad, he said the initiative must go "beyond military operations." Ordinary Iraqis, Bush said, "must see visible improvements" in their neighborhoods.

Reliable electric power is only one such improvement, but it is a critical one, counterinsurgency specialists said.

more: http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nationworld/iraq/bal-te.powerless02mar02,0,644223.story?track=rss

[ClintonTyree]

1. To ""catch up with demand"?

:wtf: Well, I guess there will be a hell of a demand increase when the millions of Iraqi refugees can actually return to their homeland. Of course they probably won't have any homes to return to what with "the surge" clearing out entire neighborhoods and all. Electricity won't really be a problem for them right away I guess. Isn't freedom grand? I imagine these people have never been happier in their lives. :eyes:

[wellst0nev0ter]

2. Trying. . .To. . .Hold Down. . .Bile. . .

Nope, not happening :puke:

[sofa king]

3. How many Halliburton employees does it take to change a light bulb?

Obviously, more than we have in Iraq right now.

[LynnTheDem]

4. Funny how Saddam had no problems restoring electricity within weeks.

Yet the Great America can't do it in 10 years.

[ohio2007]

12. ?

link please? Baghdad aleways had a power problem and would roll blackouts into the shia areas of the country to keep the lights on in Saddams palaces.

[LiberalFighter]

5. It doesn't look like there has been much change since 2004

At the Al-Dora power station in Baghdad on May 3 (2004), the deputy manager of the plant, Bashir Khalaf Omair, said that electricity output in Iraq prior to the March, 2003 invasion was around 5,000 Megawatts (MW) a day.

Iraq’s Acting Minister of Electricity, Ra’ad Al-Haris, said in an interview Thursday that the current supply of electricity produced in Iraq measures between 3,600-4,000 MW.

Currently, even in the best neighbourhoods of Baghdad there is only twelve hours of electricity per day, and this only intermittently. Most areas of the city have between six and eight hours of power per 24 hours. (16-18 hours without electricity)

According to deputy manager Omair, Iraq has suffered from a shortage of electricity since the 1991 Gulf War during which American pilots bombed power plants. He added that prior to the 1991 war, Iraq was producing 9,500 MW of electricity per day.

* * *
As of 2004 they were projecting a need of 7000 to 7500 MW per day.

(Feb 2006) Price of fuel 3 to 5 times what it was in September 2005. Fuel used for their home generators.

Iraq Insurgents Starve Capital of Electricity 12/19/2006

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.

(Why don't they have security forces at these locations to prevent sabotage?)

[Igel]

8. Why don't they secure them?

How.

Consider power lines in the US: every hundred yards or so there's a tower. To guard a line you need to put people at each tower. If you put 3 guards at each one, you're tying up only 50 or 60 guys, but you're leaving groups of 3 guys exposed to attack by insurgents, 100 yards from the nearest support. Tactically it's a nightmare.

If you patrol, it does little good: How long does it take to come out from behind some trees, put a bomb at the base of the tower, and run? Then you can wait, in hiding, for the patrol to come along and kill some Americans while reducing the tower to rubble.

But there are some real problems: The article uses the widely cited number that demand for electricity has grown some 70% since 3/03. Power used to be funneled to Baghdad, leaving many towns and villages with far less electricity than they now enjoy. And your number's a megawatt or so higher than the number cited by the article (the State Department's low-balling it to make the US look good and Iraq look bad, but the Iraqi you cite is probably guilty of the same crime in reverse). Lines are down and facilities crippled by Iraqis to hurt Iraqis and have them blame the US; meanwhile, there have been reports that generating *capacity* is at least 2 MW higher than in 3/03, but either they have problems getting the right fuel or the lines to the facilities are down.

[DavidDvorkin]

6. It's six years in the future, or three years in the past

[Javaman]

7. Bwahahahaha! From who? it ain't gonna be us that provides it!

The entire electrical grid is so fucked up or none existant. And even if this happens, the worlds energy needs will be such that they won't be able to run their turbines.

If Iraq and it's puppets had a clue they would be, in a future that doesn't include mass bombings(oh in about 20 or 30 years...maybe), turning the western half of the country into one giant solar array.

[Parche]

9. IRAQ

And homeless,jobless people here in the US are still in the dark..........tell me why?

[maddezmom]

10. Walter Reed's IAP Worldwide Services awarded over $508 million to provide electricity to Iraq

By September 22, 2003, the total value of task orders on the contract had reached $22 million—$14.3 million going to activities for the war in Iraq and $7.5 million to activities in Afghanistan—nearing the maximum $29 million contract allowance. On September 25, the Army Corps of Engineers announced that based on potential contingency requirements of the U.S. Central Command it was increasing the contract's maximum value by awarding a $494 million task order for the full five year life of the contract to rebuild Iraq's electrical system, including equipment, operations, maintenance, and training Iraqi Ministry of Electricity personnel. The increase brings the total value of International American Products contracts in Iraq to over $508 million. A USACE spokesman told the Center for Public Integrity that the $496 million increase was "a fully competed, best-value negotiated procurement." Reg Pelham, president of IAP, said that all contract information was "considered confidential" and declined to comment on any IAP contracts or media reports.



http://www.public-i.org/wow/bio.aspx?act=pro&ddlC=26

[ohio2007]

11. Baghdad NEVER had full electricity. Even under Saddam

they rule of thumb was rolling blackouts.

just a fact of life to keep the lights on for certain members of the Baath party especially during the Iran/Iraq war

[PA Democrat]

13. But it was considerably better under Saddam. 16 hours/ day then verses 4 hours now.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0210/p01s03-woiq.html

<snip>

Thanks largely to deteriorating security, electricity - along with water, sewage, and oil production - has dropped below prewar levels. Before the invasion, for example, Baghdad was receiving an average of at least 16 hours of power a day. Today, with insurgents targeting power plants and electrical lines on an almost daily basis, the city gets power just four hours each day on average.

<snip>
Iraq was generating 4,500 megawatts before the US invasion. But by November of last year that generation capacity had dropped to 3,995 megawatts, well below the national demand of 7,000 megawatts, according to a January report by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. Production has slumped despite the $3 billion - of $18.4 billion authorized for Iraq reconstruction - the US has set aside for electricity projects.