Iraq’s electricity crisis: Fifty degrees of cold promises

In Iraq, you can replace the name of Ali Falih al-Zaidi—the current prime minister—with any prime minister since 2003, and nothing in meaning or outcome would change. Every leader has made the same promise, every leader has spoken of a “turning point,” and every leader has left office without moving the national power grid a single step forward.

Al-Zaidi’s claim that 2027 will mark a doubling of electricity production and transmission capacity is not a vision; it is simply another number added to a long archive of empty promises whose endings Iraqis already know.

The irony is scorching. These promises are repeated while Iraqis endure summer temperatures exceeding fifty degrees Celsius, replaying old video clips of Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, Mustafa al-Kadhimi, Adel Abdul Mahdi, Nouri al-Maliki, and Ibrahim al-Jaafari—each of whom said the same words and left the same unresolved crisis behind. Electricity in Iraq is not a public service; it is a political curse.

One of the most absurd moments in the country’s collective memory came in 2011, when Hussein al-Shahristani, then deputy prime minister for energy, confidently announced that Iraq would “soon” begin exporting electricity to neighboring countries. It was a statement so detached from reality that Shakespeare’s rebuke—“O shame, where is thy blush?”—feels tailor-made for it.

How can a country that cannot supply its own citizens with more than a few hours of electricity a day speak of exporting power?

Western reports alone reveal the scale of the disaster. According to the U.S. Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR), Iraq and the United States spent more than $60 billion on the electricity sector during the first decade after the 2003 invasion, without achieving any structural improvement. Later assessments by the World Bank and Chatham House showed that total spending on the sector since 2003 has exceeded $100 billion, yet Iraq remains unable to provide stable electricity to its population.

These figures are not political rhetoric; they are documented in official Western reports. They show that Iraq has spent enough money to build an entirely new national grid—yet the grid remains broken, leaking, and governed not by the logic of a state but by the logic of spoils.

The World Bank adds another layer to the scandal: Iraq loses nearly 40% of its generated electricity through technical and commercial losses—an astonishing figure unmatched by any other major oil-producing nation. The country also relies heavily on imported gas and electricity to run its power stations, despite possessing vast domestic gas reserves that continue to be flared rather than captured.

How can a country double its production by 2027 when it cannot even preserve what it produces today?

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The International Monetary Fund describes Iraq’s electricity sector as “a massive fiscal burden that fails to provide adequate service or recover costs,” noting that government subsidies consume billions of dollars annually without improving daily life. This is not a struggling sector; it is a collapsed one, recycled each year through new promises.

Iraqis know the outcome well. Even in its best condition, the national grid supplies households with only 8 to 12 hours of electricity per day. To fill the gap, citizens rely on private neighbourhood generators, paying between $100 and $300 per month in Baghdad during the summer, according to The Economist and Reuters.

This is not an electricity system—it is a shadow economy in which corruption is repackaged as a service, leaving citizens trapped between a failing state and generator owners who function as local power brokers.

The most painful irony is historical. Iraqis remember how electricity returned within months after the 1991 U.S. bombing campaign destroyed the country’s power stations—at a time when Iraq was under a strict international embargo that prevented the import of equipment. Today, with an open economy, vast oil revenues, and more than $100 billion spent on the sector, the state cannot rebuild what was destroyed or maintain what exists.

The reason is simple and harsh: Iraq once had a concept of the state, however authoritarian; today, that concept is gone, replaced by a system whose defining characteristic is corruption.

This is why al-Zaidi’s promise for 2027 feels like a crude joke in a country living through fifty-degree summers. You cannot double production or transmission capacity in a system built on phantom contracts, unfinished power plants, neglected infrastructure, smuggled fuel, flared gas, and a public budget drained by political patronage.

Reform does not begin with a date announced by a prime minister; it begins with dismantling the network of interests that has turned electricity into Iraq’s largest field of corruption.

Iraq’s electricity crisis is the tragedy of a state that has lost the ability to manage the simplest necessities of life but has not lost the ability to produce political rhetoric. Prime ministers will continue repeating the same line—“We reassure the Iraqi people”—and Iraqis will continue replaying old promises each summer, as the same failure reveals itself again.

Unless the core problem is addressed—state absence and corruption dominance—any talk of 2027 will remain just another chapter in a long-running play whose ending the audience knows before the curtain rises.

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