Iraq's Electrical Situation

IEEE Spectrum has a marvelous article on rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure by Glenn Zorpette. Aside from intesting text, it has some sweet Iraq power maps. It covers the electrical grid quite well.

Given all the problems we are wrestling with in the U.S. over energy issues, the problems in Iraq may give us some perspective. I really enjoyed this article because it comes from an engineering perspective rather than a political perspective.

The article has some unsurprising background:

It would be hard to find another endeavor, anywhere, anytime, in which so much was asked of engineers, personally and professionally. Never before has so vast a reconstruction program been attempted in the face of enemy fire or managed in the shadow of geopolitics, where infrastructure itself became a battleground.

Insurgents were blowing up electrical transmission towers at an average rate of two a day this past August, and Iraqi workers and foreign contractors were risking their lives to put them back up. Throughout reconstruction, projects have gotten funds, lost them, and sometimes even gotten them back again, according to changes in the prevailing political winds. Generating plants have been built that can't be fueled; a water pumping station repaired for $225 million was rendered useless by countless leaks in the pipes connected to it. Five distribution substations were built for $28.8 million, but they'll sit idle for years because the infrastructure to tap into them hasn't been started yet.

But also features some rather shocking numbers:

All of the money pledged so far for Iraq's reconstruction adds up to roughly $60 billion, according to a report last July by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). U.S. officials whom I interviewed in Iraq this past October said that the current consensus was that the final tally might be as high as $100 billion. For comparison, in the first two years of their reconstruction after being devastated in wars, Germany, Japan, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan together received a total of $25.6 billion, in 2003 dollars, according to the United States Institute of Peace, a congressionally created organization devoted to conflict resolution. The first European Recovery Program, known as the Marshall Plan, which rebuilt much of Western Europe after World War II, spent the equivalent of about $90 billion in today's dollars between 1948 and 1951.

Even though the dollars are in 2003 dollars, I don't know how you can compare the societal demands of rebuilding a society 60 years ago and building a modern one today.

For our purposes, it is most interesting when it delves into the numbers dealing with the electrical sector.

According to last summer's GAO report, some $5.7 billion had been spent on work in the electrical sector in the two years prior to spring 2005. ... What that investment bought was, among other things, the addition or restoration of several thousand megawatts of generating capacity (although at any given time less than half of it is actually available on the grid), several hundred kilometers of new or refurbished transmission lines, one new and one rebuilt transmission substation, and 44 new or improved distribution substations.

Still, there's a long way to go. According to the latest figures, the country's 173 generating units, spread among some 35 power plants, can reliably produce just under 5000 MW at peak periods. That falls well short of peak demand, which was estimated to be 8845 MW last summer and is expected to be 10 000 MW next summer.

As reflected in a U.S. Central Command briefing I attended a few months ago, Iraq actually generates more power overall while most people in Iraq get fewer hours of availability. How does that work? Well, a few people have it all the time and skew the data.

But honestly, the people in Iraq have bigger problems than electricity, right? Well, not according to them:

In the most recent survey by the International Republican Institute, a prodemocracy advocacy group in Washington, D.C., 2200 Iraqis were asked which of 10 different problems "requiring a political or governmental solution" was most important to them. The first choice, by a margin of about 10 percent, was "inadequate electricity." "National security" came in fifth; the "presence of multinational forces" was seventh; and "terrorists" was eighth.

A popular if not universal idea is that a more robust electrical system would be a weapon against the insurgency; it's a concept the insurgents themselves have helped propagate by focusing so many of their attacks on the electrical infrastructure. Counterinsurgency, it has been said, can't really succeed without successful efforts to improve a country's political and economic base. And few analysts dispute the idea that one of the key obstacles to further economic progress in Iraq is its inadequate electrical system.

Solving the electrical problem would theoretically greatly help Iraq's chances of turning away from civil war. It would allow increased economic development - which would decrease antagonism between sectarian groups. People are easily pushed to hate their neighbors when they are unemployed and future prpspects are bleak.

One of the main desires for electricity is during the extremely hot summer months. They want air conditioning. However, most Iraqis are not charged for electricity. No wonder demand is rapidly increasingly. The nearly free cost of electricity is caused by both technological and social factors. Many consumptiuon meters are broken and therefore worthless for measuring use (a prerequisite to charging for it). On the social side, politicians worldwide are reluctant to drive up prices of electricity because it angers their constituents. In addition, raising rates at a time when electricity is so constrained will upset constituents all the more.

Regardless of the problems caused by under-pricing electricity, there are other major sources of inefficiency in Iraq.

In the vicinity of the Quds complex, I notice several towering flare stacks across the street from the power plant, at an oil field called East Baghdad. Atop one of the stacks, an enormous orange flame indicates that natural gas pouring out of the oil deposits is being burned off steadily to keep it from exploding. Such flaring goes on continually all over Iraq. It is so widespread in the huge southern oil fields west of Basra that it actually fills the night sky with light.

The flaring is notable because if all that gas were captured, pressurized, and distributed rather than being burned off, it could be used to meet more than half of Iraq's demand for electricity. At the moment, Iraq is flaring more than 28 million cubic meters of gas a day. It's enough to fire at least 4000 MW of electricity.

The bottom of page 2 goes into detail about the problems with the combustion turbines, but I'll only include the end result of that discussion. This is just a fascinating article.

Iraq's 110 combustion turbines alone could in theory generate well over 4000 MW if they were being fueled by natural gas. So far, though, the actual output of these combustion turbine generators hasn't come close to half of that figure. At Quds, I begin to understand why.

The question is why they are using combustion turbines rather than steam-thermal. There are a number of reasons, but chief among them is the ineptitude of the U.S. ocupation administration.

"When we were starting to rebuild," says one of the formerly retired Iraqi engineers now working at Quds, "the U.S. didn't take the advice of the Ministry of Electricity on where to build plants and what kind of plants to build. It was a shortcoming in planning."

One of their considerations was time to build. The steam-thermal plants (which can take any fuel) take twice as long (or longer) to build than the combustion turbine plants (which are currently fueled by IMPORTING diesel fuel from Turkey). The U.S. wanted quick results and pushed for the inappropriate generators.