Power supply improves in the capital

Residents of the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, have welcomed an improvement in the supply of power after nearly five months of unpredictable outages. For a week now, the city has had more controlled outages, with power on and off every three hours. Previously power was available for just two hours daily. The situation had become so serious that during August summer season, one of the worse since the fall of Saddam Hussein in April 2003, millions of residents sleept outside because there was not enough power to run air conditioners. "We are very happy with the improvements in the power supply. Our children were becoming sick due to the constant shortages and the hot summer that we had this year," said Hisham Sarluti, 34, a local Baghdad resident. Rehabilitation work on the power supply system has been going on since October 2003. According to the Ministry of Electricity and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), production had reached 5,389 MW in July – higher than pre-war levels. USAID and the electricity ministry expect to place an additional 400 MW on the national grid by December 2005. Insurgents have, however, delayed the work countrywide, ministry officials said. For example, in some Sunni districts like Adhamiya, they attacked power systems with rockets earlier this year. Sarmad Kadham, a senior ministry official said the completed repairs were conducted under very difficult security circumstances. Constant bomb attacks in the last months on power supply lines had made the situation more critical. "Our main difficulty is to offer security to all employees. For this reason, the repairs are sometimes late but we are working hard to show that insurgency or those who want to affect Iraqi’s life will not win," he added. USAID has initiated a project to rehabilitate 13 existing substations and construct 24 new substations in Baghdad. These projects will further improve the distribution of electricity for more than 2 million Baghdad residents. Kadham explained that supply had also been affected by huge consumption across Iraq, especially using big electrical equipment. "The annual energy consumption in otther countries increases around 4 percent a year but here we have had an increase of 30 percent a year since 2003," he added. The Iraqi government has now started a campaign asking the population, especially in the capital, to reduce the use of unnecessary equipments and stop installing lights where they are not needed. "The power supply is somehow better due to the decrease in use of air-conditioners because autumn weather is starting. But the use of electrical heaters in the coming winter may affect the supply again," Kadham said.