Powerful Progress
Working in Kurdistan last year, I would often get frustrated with the electricity situation. We were supposed to have a constant power supply, but nearly everyday the power at our apartment would cut out. Sometimes it was only off for five minutes, other times we would be without power for hours. Once my roommate and I would realize it was going to be a long wait (usually if it hadn't come back on within fifteen minutes, it was going to be at least two hours), we would call our guards and have them start the generator. Assuming they had refilled the gas tank, this would generally buy us enough time until the power grid came back on line.
Having power cut out in the middle of the day was annoying- we couldn't watch television, our wireless internet was useless, our electronic appliances in the kitchen were dead... basically we couldn't do anything. I got a lot of reading in until I ran out of books. But when the power would shut down in the middle of the night, it was terrible. In the winter, the heaters stopped working and we'd wake up freezing. The summer was even worse- within fifteen minutes of our air conditioning going out, I would be awake, sweating and trying to crawl into the freezer.
It was absolutely horrible.
One day at work I was talking to a fellow teacher, and I was complaining about the power cuts. I went on and on about how I hadn't slept the night before due to the heat and how tired I was, both physically and mentally, of dealing with this night after night.
She was a repatriated local teacher, Kurdish by birth and newly returned from living abroad. She just smiled while I talked, nodding her head in sympathy. When I finished, she told me to consider myself fortunate. As a foreign teacher, we had been set up to have near-constant power. Local residents were limited to one hour of power per day. The power plant couldn't handle the load required to run the entire city at once, so each neighborhood was allotted one hour a day and the electric output rotated around the city. People had to plan their day around their time slot, to make sure they would be home to charge phone batteries, do a quick load of laundry and any other chores that needed power, and if they were lucky, catch a television show.
The Minister of Electricity was nicknamed the One Hour Minister.
Some of the wealthier families could afford generators and the gas to run them, but even then they only used them at night. Walking down the street in the evenings, you could see and hear massive generators running at full steam to power businesses and restaurants. But regular families would rely on candles for light and somehow dealt with the heat. I'm still not sure how.
And shockingly, even this was an improvement from before. Prior to 2001, there was no power station whatsoever in the city. When homes were first hooked up for their hour a day, people were excited. Power in every home was a huge step forward, even if it was just for one hour.
But as the city is working hard to improve the quality of life for everyone here, they have installed a five kilowatt power station. I don't know much about energy output, and while five kilowatts sound impressive, I don't know how that equates to powering a city of one million people. More impressive to me is the number of hours the entire city can run on grid power. From one hour per home last year, the city of Erbil is now running power a whopping twenty-two hours for every home, every day.
Talk about coming out of the dark ages.
