Power Delayed: Iraq’s Electricity Crisis

As presented by the past two decades of life in the country, Iraq’s power crisis appears interminable. Following the transfer of power, Iraqis have attempted multiple times to upset this troubling dynamic. When the head of the Trade Bank of Iraq blocked a six billion purchase of 29 diesel turbines in 2011, he soon found himself the target of a corruption probe and fled the country.^[1] In 2018, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi pursued a $15 billion contract with Siemens until U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to accept the GE by “holding a gun to our head.”^[2] Most recently, Iraqi lawmakers have called for an investigation into GE’s contracts yet it is unclear what the creation of a panel would yield.^[3] Yet, solutions to Iraq’s electricity crisis beyond buying and building more power plants are widely available and discussed. For Frank Gunter, the first and most “controversial option is to accept that Iraq has no shortage of capacity.”^[4] His proposal involves restructuring the incentives of power plants in Iraq around efficiency and cooperating with the Ministry of Oil to ensure access to the correct standard fuel was available. The challenge of his proposal is generating inter-ministry political support in an environment where the political parties rely on bribery and contract kickbacks for income. If it is true, as this paper presents, that the challenge Iraq faces is not merely political but a structural facet of infrastructure technologies, then reform is not an option. Absent another comprehensive sanctions program against Iraq, neither GE nor its competitors have any reason to abandon their service monopoly in Iraq.

Partly out of necessity and partly out of realistic prognosis of the state of Iraqi politics, Iraqis themselves have chosen to act beyond the horizon of electoral politics. In Basra, electrical engineers take part in organizing popular protests against the lack of electricity and clean water. The demonstrations in recent summers have grown in size and spirit. In 2018, they found success in blocking power plant roads and provincial offices until their governate received a greater provision of electricity.^[5] These acts of sabotage have offered a blueprint for resistance in other districts, with protestors in Karbala storming the Al-Khairat Power Station this past summer with similar demands.

Circumventing a reliance on the electrical infrastructure through decentralized alternatives may provide another means to give power to the people. As was Edison’s original conception for electrical systems, Iraqis have purchased thousands of small generators to distribute electricity locally. However, these neighborhood generators have become notorious for their high prices, noise and air pollution, and affiliation with fuel mafias. Another alternative gaining traction is decentralized solar power microgrids.^[6] The rapid adoption of these projects in South and East Africa have signaled their broader viability. Photovoltaic cells do not rely on access to diesel fuel, making for a cleaner form of energy production. Deployed on top of rooftops, they are also more difficult to be controlled by one single group within a community. Whether they could be deployed equitably and effectively in Iraq remains yet to be seen.

Nevertheless, the challenges Iraqi face now are not theirs alone. Reports from Nigeria, Pakistan, and Sudan all document General Electric’s inability to tamp power shortages despite the billions in contracts.^[7] As it turns out, GE is not particularly interested in producing power for Iraq or anywhere else for that matter. Nor is the issue is not only limited to General Electric or power plant manufacturers in general. In the United States, the number of power failures has doubled in the past five years.^[8] Electricity grid operators have undermined the physical durability of their infrastructure to increase profits from their repair and replacement. With that in mind, the February 2021 Texas power crisis and 2020 California electrical line instigated Camp fires appear less as once-in-a-century flukes than a century of infrastructure designed to extract rents.

This study on Iraq’s power system has demonstrated the peculiar function of electrical infrastructure to extract consistent rents from a population under the auspices of power production. Yet, as our reading of Mitchell has shown, these architectures also “allow the accumulation of capital to bypass the work of building durable or productive structures for collective life.”^[9] The crises of the 21st century, namely the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change, threaten to destabilize energy markets, disrupt global supply chains, and disable centralized power grids. In its wake, critical infrastructure and the billions of lives that depend on them are becoming increasingly vulnerable to devastation. After nearly two decades and nearly $100 billion spent instructing Iraq’s electrical engineers to operate a fundamentally inoperative system, perhaps it is time to take a page from Iraqis’ experience in resilience and resistance in the service of a brighter future.