Power Delayed: Iraq’s Electricity Crisis

“The recent conflict has wrought near-apocalyptic results upon what had been, until January 1991, a rather highly urbanized and mechanized society. Now, most of modern life support has been destroyed or rendered tenuous. Iraq has, for some time to come, been relegated to a pre-industrial age, but with all the disabilities of post-industrial dependency on an intensive use of energy and technology.”
Martti Ahtisaari, UN Under-Secretary-General, 1991

Over the course of the last three decades, Iraq has pumped 73 million barrels of oil, the equivalent of 44 times the country’s total energy consumption since 1990.^[1] Yet in every year for the last 30 years, Iraq has failed to provide enough electricity to meet its domestic consumption. Year after year, the United States and General Electric (GE) collaborate to install new power plants, refurbish substations, and repair turbines. Yet, from smart sanctions to smart bombs and now smart grids, the world’s ‘greatest military’ and its ‘most respectable company’ have instead left the country in a state of perpetual dysfunction.

The objective of this study is to capture the contortion of the flows of energy and capital that make possible this arrangement. Drawing on Timothy Mitchell’s “Infrastructures Work on Time,” this paper argues that Iraq’s electrical infrastructure is designed not to deliver power to its inhabitants but a durable stream of income to its financiers. Consequently, large-scale electrical infrastructure projects function greater as a capitalizable asset than as a key factor of production. As a result, Iraq’s electrical system continues to experience widespread blackouts because the system generates more value from service annuities than in actually powering the national grid.

This work sets out by demystifying a trio of tropes around the malfunction of Iraq’s electrical system. Tracing out the inception of electricity systems in the United States and Iraq, this paper develops a theory of infrastructure as primarily an operation to extract rents from the future. This theory is then applied to understand the resilience of Iraq’s electrical grid following its devastation during 1990 Gulf War and subsequent sanctions. Returning to the present, the study reconceptualizes Iraq’s continued power failure as the intentional consequence of the product-service business model espoused by General Electric and related authorities. At the same time, it reveals how the material attributes that confer infrastructure’s financial durability create possibilities for restitution through sabotage and decentralization.