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Power generation investments wasted
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Azzaman - [9/17/2006]
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As power shortages worsen with the national grid hardly operational, a senior electricity official says investments made so far were useless.
Aziz al-Rubai, a head engineer at the Ministry of Electricity, said the huge sums the country spent on constructing and rehabilitating fuel oil-driven plants have almost come to nothing.
He did not say how much Iraq had invested in the electricity sector since the U.S. invasion, but experts estimate the figure at nearly 1 billion dollars.
“The kind of power plants constructed in Baghdad and other provinces are ineffective because they run on fuel oil,” he said.
He said instead of alleviating the shortages, “these plants have aggravated them.”
“Huge amounts of money have been spent on their construction and still they are of little or no benefit,” he added.
He said the only solution to Iraq’s power shortages lied in the construction of what he described as “gigantic thermal plants” which have the capacity to generate a lot of electricity.
Despite massive investments, the authorities have failed to produce as much power as during the last months before the fall of former President Saddam Hussein.
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