Analysis: Electricity master plan ‘flawed’

Iraq is to present its new Electricity Master Plan on Feb. 1 at a conference in Istanbul. Thus far, the ministry has not committed to publishing. Based on a reading of an advance copy, however, the new plan is fatally flawed because many of its starting assumptions are not based on facts on the ground, but rather on the wishful perceptions of those who compiled it.

In this respect it treads the precise path of its predecessor, the Electricity Ministry’s 2006 master plan, which resulted in failure. As the accompanying graph shows, production gains have risen only very modestly since then – mainly due to imports – and have not nearly kept pace with forecasted output.