Iraq Powered By a Patchwork Grid

Iraq Powered By a Patchwork Grid

Jun 17 - Tulsa World

Amber and red lights flicker on a battered panel covered with dials and black knobs that operate a pneumatic control system for Turbine No. 6, at the 1960s-era Baghdad South power plant on the Tigris River.

No. 6, an old electrical turbine, once enjoyed a certain amount of fame. It was one of the first to spring back to life in 1991 after the Persian Gulf War. Now it groans like an indictment of the reconstruction effort: Of the six huge turbines at this plant, No. 6 is the only one producing much power.

Repairs have suffered from the difficulty of finding parts for machines that are so outdated, and from the pullout of a Russian engineering company after two of its employees were shot in an ambush.

"We would love to replace this control room with a modern, up-to- date control room," said Ghassan Ahmed, a technical operator at Baghdad South, "but we can't."

At the Doura plant, also in Baghdad, the director, Bashir Khalaf Omir, pauses when asked if it is safe for engineers to come to work. "It's not so easy question to answer," Omir said. "Maybe yes, maybe some other answer."

Inside the plant, greasy parts from several turbine generators are spread all over the floor, like some giant automotive garage. Omir said local engineers have largely taken over for the Russians, but that delays by the German engineering company Siemens in sending parts and technical experts has lengthened the schedule for other work.

The mood is brighter at a plant at Nasiriyah, in the south, where one set of contractors is scraping barnacles from the cooling water system of an old plant next to the Euphrates River, and another is installing a brand-new generator.

Assembling the generator, which is supposed to add 40 megawatts to the grid by June 24, required 240 truckloads of equipment sent in from Kuwait and the southern Iraqi city of Basra, said Grady Turner Jr., a superintendent with Perini, the contractor on the project.

No Baedeker of the Iraqi power grid would be complete without the Haditha hydroelectric dam northwest of Baghdad, near the Syrian border. With astonishing incongruity in the bleakest of desert lands, a soft breeze turns over small whitecaps on a huge reservoir fed by the Euphrates as waterfalls splash over greenery growing under the spillways.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers replaced one of the steel turbine blades that turn like pinwheels as water rushes through the bowels of the dam. Inside, at the very bottom of the dam, the water lashes and keens and roars as it turns the new turbine behind a reinforced steel door.

For far more extensive news on the energy/power visit: http://www.energycentral.com .