"People are tired; we don't want them to wait for a longer time?" Diyar Baban, general director of Kurdistan's electricity production.

For years, Kurdistan Region suffered from darkness--there were days when people here did not have even one hour of electricity. Today, the region has 20 hours electricity a day.

Despite the improvement, the electricity sector in Kurdistan still suffers from a lot of problems; the system requires rehabilitation, reinforcement, and development in order to provide adequate and reliable power to the existing consumers and to cater for the connection of new consumers.

The networks are very poor, the distribution system is not modern, huge amount of power is wasted every day because the network is very poor, and there are illegal connections everywhere in the region.

Last week, the KRG Ministry of Electricity held a conference to discuss its 20-year master plan, which was prepared by British Parsons Brinckerhoff (PB) Company. The program manager of Parsons Brinckerhoff, Alastair Johnson, pointed out that there is a huge demand for electricity in Kurdistan since the region is expanding so fast.

Kurdistan has the potential to produce electricity from wind, solar power, and fuel, but the government decided to depend on fuel since it is faster and cheaper.

The general director of producing electricity in Kurdistan, Diyar Baban, said that "people are tired; we don't want them to wait for a longer time. That's why we decided to depend on fuel for producing power it is faster."

Baban told the "Globe" that people only pay 10 percent of the original cost that government spends to produce power. "For each kilowatt for an hour, government spends 16 U.S. cents; kilowatt per hour, each household pays one and a half cents," he said.

Currently Kurdistan Region needs 150 megawatts every day, but the region now produces 950 megawatts mainly from fuel. The Erbil city power plant, the biggest power plant in the region, can produce 500 megawatt in a day. The plant every day needs 1.5 million liters of diesel.

The Kurdistan government says every day it spends U.S.$2.5 million in order to produce electricity for the region.

Iraq has the world's second-largest proven reserves (more than 110 billion barrels), and the 10th-largest gas reserves (110 trillion cubic feet). Seventy oil fields have been discovered, but only 20 have been producing and another 23 are awaiting development. It is estimated that there are 300 billion barrels of oil reserves still to be discovered.

The potential oil and gas reserves of Kurdistan are extremely large, and it is anticipated that Kurdistan will have sufficient gas and oil to meet its electricity generation requirements for the foreseeable future.

Regarding producing power from wind and solar power in Kurdistan considered much more environmentally friendly there is potential, but it is very expensive and takes a long time.

PB has carried out as part of this master-plan study a desktop-based constraint assessment of the potential for large wind projects based on World Wind Atlas information, maps, and publicly available information. The assessment showed that there is potential for wind-farm development in the three provinces of Kurdistan Region Duhok, Erbil, and Suleimaniya.

Due to the unavailability of a complete network model of the distribution system, a huge amount of power is wasted every day. "Thirty percent of the power we produce in a day is wasted because the network system is very old," said Baban. "We have a plan to buy modern equipment in order to build the electricity infrastructure," he added.

PB is a British electricity company whose head office is located at the Briton capital city of London; it's been in operation for almost 100 years with branches spread across the globe.

By Qassim Khidhir

© The Kurdish Globe 2009

 

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