Power was out across Iraq on Monday as scorching summer temperatures pushed electricity grid demand to unprecedented levels, authorities said.
The outage came amid a heatwave that Iraqi meteorological services expect to last more than a week, with temperatures climbing as high as 50C in parts of the country.
Mitigating the grid interruption was the fact that most households rely on private generators, acquired to compensate for daily power cuts to public electricity.
The electricity ministry said the grid suffered a “total outage” after two transmission lines were shut down “due to a record rise in temperatures, increased consumer demand, and increased electrical load in the provinces of Babylon and Karbala, which are experiencing an influx of millions of pilgrims” for a major Shiite Muslim religious commemoration.
The shutdown caused “a sudden and accidental loss of more than 6,000 megawatts on the grid”, the ministry added, with power plants also halting operations.
“Our teams are currently mobilised on the ground to gradually restore the grid over the next few hours,” the ministry said.
The northern Kurdistan region was spared. The autonomous territory has worked to modernise its power sector and was able to provide round-the-clock state electricity to a third of its population.
Authorities later announced that power was being restored in stages in the southern provinces of Dhi Qar and Maysan, with the strategic port city of Basra expected to have electricity back by dawn on Tuesday.
Electricity shortages are a frequent complaint in Iraq, which is sometimes rocked by protests when outages worsen in the hot summer months.
– ‘More intense’ –
Heatwaves in Iraq are “more intense and more frequent” than they were in the 20th century, meteorological service spokesman Amer al-Jaberi told AFP, blaming climate change and human factors.
He said gas emissions and fumes from private generators “contribute to the rise in temperatures”, and called for the creation of a “green belt” around Baghdad “so the city can breathe a little”.
In July 2023, a fire at a transmission station in the south caused a widespread power outage.
While the vast majority of Iraqis rely on private generators, they often cannot power all household appliances, especially air conditioners.
Even without a nationwide blackout, Iraq’s poorest endure the intense heat daily.
“It’s hot, we don’t have electricity, it comes on for two hours and then we can sleep a little and rest,” said Haider Abbas, a 44-year-old day labourer, in his concrete-walled home on Sunday.
Originally from the town of Al-Qassim in Babylon province, central Iraq, the father of five cannot afford an air conditioner and relies instead on an air cooler that he constantly refills with water bottles.
“When I was little, we didn’t have these (high) temperatures,” he recalled. “At 52 degrees Celsius, I can’t work.”
To avoid outages during peak demand, Iraq would need to produce around 55,000 megawatts of electricity.
This month, for the first time, the country’s power plants reached the 28,000-megawatt threshold.
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