An Iraqi girl uses a lantern to do her homework in Baghdad 18 March 2006. Three years after the US-led war against Iraq that started 20 March 2003, Iraqis still suffer from power cuts that reaches to 12 hours on daily basis. Three years after an invasion turned their lives upside down; Iraqis describe a daily reality of pervasive insecurity, lack of basic services and the shadowy foreign powers they say are behind the rising blood-letting. AFP PHOTO/SABAH ARAR (Photo by SABAH ARAR / AFP) (Photo by SABAH ARAR/AFP via Getty Images)
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I recently appeared on Cross Lines, a televised current-affairs program on Al-Ahad TV (Iraq), hosted by Bayraq Faisal Ghazi, to discuss why Iraq—after spending tens of billions of dollars—still cannot deliver reliable electricity to its citizens. It’s a question that goes beyond Iraq’s borders. It highlights how nations emerging from war and instability struggle to rebuild even the most basic infrastructure, despite possessing vast natural and financial resources.
Iraq’s electricity crisis is not just a story of technical failure—it’s a story of mismatched expectations. U.S.-based General Electric vowed to restore megawatts. Germany’s Siemens promised to help build a nation. But both ran headlong into the same systemic roadblocks: instability, bureaucracy, and political fragmentation that no foreign contractor—however capable—can fix alone.
“Every time we think we’re getting close to fixing the grid, politics pulls the plug,” said Mahmoud Abbas, an electrical engineer and expert at the Iraqi Electricity Ministry, in a story printed by The Media Line.
Two Models, One Challenge
TOPSHOT – An Iraqi power worker drinks mineral water as he works on a transmission tower in the summer heat, in Baghdad, 26 July 2003. Efforts to rebuild Iraq have been stymied by breakdowns and sabotage, delaying the restoration of electricity supplies to pre-war levels, more than three months after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime. AFP PHOTO/MARWAN NAAMANI (Photo by MARWAN NAAMANI / AFP) (Photo by MARWAN NAAMANI/AFP via Getty Images)
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After the 2003 U.S. invasion, Iraq’s power infrastructure lay in ruins. Transmission lines were destroyed, substations looted, and generation plants bombed. Foreign contractors stepped into this vacuum—each with a distinct approach to rebuilding the grid. The government has since spent an estimated $100 billion on generation, transmission, and distribution projects, yet blackouts remain a daily reality.
Peak demand now exceeds 40 gigawatts, while actual generation rarely exceeds 23 gigawatts, according to the Iraq Ministry of Electricity and a 2023 Atlantic Council report on the country’s power sector. Even when new capacity is added, distribution losses—caused by aging equipment, theft, and mismanagement—consume roughly a third of generated electricity.
GE approached Iraq with a technical, project-focused model. Contracts totaling more than $1.2 billion covered upgrades and maintenance for gas turbines, substations, and transmission lines. For example, GE signed a $400 million contract to rebuild 14 electric substations across Baghdad, Basra, Karbala, and other regions. In 2024–2025, GE Vernova modernized dozens of gas turbines, adding roughly 500 megawatts to the national grid. Transmission upgrades energized five major substations, enough to power around a million people once the full project is operational.
Siemens, in contrast, adopted a more holistic approach, combining technical upgrades with workforce development, sustainable power projects, and financial structuring to help Iraq access international credit. The company also integrated small socio-economic initiatives, such as health clinics and vocational training programs, into its roadmap. Siemens invested around $763 million in gas-fired plants, turbine upgrades, and new substations. The vision was ambitious: not just delivering electricity, but building the long-term capacity for Iraq to manage and maintain it.
Iraq’s Electrical System Needs Shock Therapy
A station wagon with two coffins on its roof draped in blankets speeds past an electric power plant bombed by the Allied forces in Baghdad, with huge smoke rising to the skyline of the city, during the Gulf War, 25th February 1991. (Photo by Kaveh Kazemi/Getty Images)
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Yet both approaches ran into the same systemic obstacles. Politics, bureaucracy, and weak institutions often delayed approvals and redirected funds mid-project. Even when turbines were installed or substations energized, fuel shortages, transmission bottlenecks, and operational mismanagement prevented meaningful improvements in the electricity supply.
According to the 2023 Atlantic Council report on Iraq’s energy sector, the country’s electricity system remains fragmented, underfunded, and vulnerable to political instability. The analysis underscores a broader lesson: rebuilding Iraq’s energy system isn’t just about bricks, wires, and fuel—it’s about governance, how decisions are made and enforced, and institutional capacity, the know-how and coordination needed to turn plans on paper into electricity in people’s homes.
GE’s reputation has been clouded by past ethical problems. In 2009, the U.S. SEC charged the company with improper accounting, resulting in a $50 million penalty, and in 2019, whistleblower Harry Markopolos alleged major accounting irregularities, claiming it was “a bigger fraud than Enron.”
Siemens, too, had global bribery issues in the past, though it has since refocused on transparency and long-term local engagement.
These histories don’t imply wrongdoing in Iraq, but they illustrate the fragility of trust when public funds and infrastructure are involved. Contractors’ reputations matter, particularly in high-risk, post-conflict environments where oversight is limited.
Despite billions spent and contracts executed, Iraqis still live with long blackouts. Schools rely on generators, hospitals cope with intermittent power supplies, and small businesses lose operations or incur higher energy costs. The gap between the promises of foreign contractors and the lived reality of Iraqis highlights a simple fact: even the best technical solutions cannot succeed without capable institutions to manage them.
Still Heavy On Fossil Fuels
During the Gulf War, a pair of American soldiers stand in the turret of an M1A1 Abrams tank as, near the border with Iraq, oil wells burn in the distance, Kuwait, March 20, 1991. (Photo by Allan Tannenbaum/Getty Images)
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Some might argue that the contractors bear responsibility. If GE or Siemens had been more diligent, Iraq’s energy crisis might have been mitigated. Yet this perspective oversimplifies the challenge. Weak oversight, fragmented budgets, and political gridlock mean that even the most capable foreign partners cannot overcome systemic governance failures.
But the deeper problem isn’t foreign contracts or political instability. It’s the fact that the country’s electricity system remains almost entirely fossil-based—two decades after the war ended. Roughly 99% of its power still comes from oil and natural gas, with a sliver from aging hydro plants.
The government has announced a 12-gigawatt renewable energy target by 2030, primarily solar, but this plan has largely stalled due to financing gaps, land disputes, and bureaucratic inertia. A handful of pilot solar projects have broken ground in Karbala, Babil, and Basra, yet together they supply only a fraction of daily demand.
For all its talk of diversification, Iraq’s grid today looks almost identical to what it was a decade ago—reliant on gas, underinvested in transmission, and undependable.
GE and Siemens sit squarely inside this paradox. Both firms were brought in to stabilize Iraq’s electricity supply by modernizing and expanding gas-fired capacity, capturing flared gas, and retrofitting turbines to increase output. Their work has indeed added generating capacity and improved efficiency, but it has also reinforced the system’s dependence on fossil fuels. The ongoing lack of large-scale renewables is less about technical limitations and more about structural issues: a political economy still grounded in oil, where every kilowatt is linked to fuel subsidies, patronage, and the state’s machinery.
In that sense, Iraq’s stalled diversification effort mirrors its broader reconstruction struggle—ambitious on paper, faltering in practice, and still beholden to the same economic logic that left the grid in ruins in the first place.
“A reliable power supply is the foundation for a stable society. Electrification of large parts of an entire country is therefore one of the most important tasks of our business,” Siemens Energy CEO Christian Bruch told Reuters.
Iraq’s blackout is not a failure of technology, but rather a collapse of coordination, governance, and trust. GE and Siemens entered with legitimate ambitions to help, yet they were ensnared by a system too fragile to sustain them. The lesson extends beyond Iraq: infrastructure cannot outpace the institutions responsible for managing it. Until that gap narrows, even the best laid plans and brightest promises will flicker out.
