It’s Better to Light a Single Candle
because the Iraqi power grid is not doing so well. Tim Lambert glosses the IEEE Spectrum report on the failing Quds generating station. MNF-Iraq announced the project to upgrade the facility back in July 2005 – it turned out to be one more instance of RSN Syndrome.
Glenn Reynolds clutches at a bit of prose from the same report in an attempt to give us, if not “the good news” from Iraq, the “kind of good news”:
Because electricity is essentially free, Iraqis have responded much as you might expect: by buying and using air conditioners, television sets, and refrigerators in record numbers. “We don’t even know what demand really is, because it is unconstrained by price,” says Crane, the Rand economist. Until the ministry begins charging more realistic rates for electricity, he warns, “you could put a hundred billion dollars into the electrical system and not satisfy demand.”
Which is all very nice. But the suggestion on Crane’s part that Iraq’s real electricity problem is skyrocketing demand is false. As Lambert points out, the numbers show that production has been slack for two years, rising only intermittently above prewar levels and never approaching the ambitious goals originally set by the Coalition Provisional Authority after the war. (See page 28 of Brookings’ Iraq Index.) Curiously, peak output figures for Baghdad have been “NA” since May 2004 – you know, Baghdad? The national capital and headquarters of the Coalition? Reconstruction central? The place crawling with folks Iraqi and foreign whose job consists of measuring stuff? Apparently Baghdad keeps being not home when we come by to read the meter or something.
Here’s why I go on about this stuff. That press release about the Quds station was, per what appears to be a dead link on Lambert’s site, an authentic “Good News from Iraq” item. The kind of joy the Main Stream Media (TM) is keeping from you. And it was just a press release about something that was going to happen eventually but never did. The people who wanted you to feel the joy and share the outrage that this bounty was being covered up are not to be taken seriously on matters of war and peace.
Comment by matthew hogan —
February 7, 2006 @ 7:36 am
”Curiously, peak output figures for Baghdad have been “NA†since May 2004 – you know, Baghdad? The national capital and headquarters of the Coalition? Reconstruction central? The place crawling with folks Iraqi and foreign whose job consists of measuring stuff?”
YOu don’t understand, there’s so much good news going on that no one has time to keep track.
Comment by Rich Puchalsky —
February 7, 2006 @ 9:43 am
They could have at least had the decency to fake up a set of Baghdad numbers for us, like most of the other numbers.
I’ve always been a bit puzzled by your focus on these numbers, actually. What was the slang that Solzhenitsyn reported? ”Tufta”, I think, the art of filling out forms so that more work is reported than actually done. Isn’t that like Libertarian Theory 101 about what happens to large governmental projects with coerced participants?
Trackback by Deltoid —
May 11, 2006 @ 2:15 pm
Good Electricity News from Iraq
In May, last year I summarized the good news about Iraqi reconstruction: Due to lack of maintenance, electricity production fell from 9000 MW in 1991 to 4400 MW before the war. Since then, there have been many announcements of improved…