Iraq announces nationwide power outage

Baghdad (AFP) — Power was out across Iraq on Monday as scorching summer temperatures pushed electricity grid demand to unprecedented levels, authorities said.

The outage came amid a heatwave that Iraqi meteorological services expect to last more than a week, with temperatures climbing as high as 50 degrees Celsius in parts of the country.

Mitigating the grid interruption was the fact that most households rely on private generators, acquired to compensate for daily power cuts to public electricity.

The electricity ministry said the grid suffered a “total outage” after two transmission lines were shut down “due to a record rise in temperatures, increased consumer demand, and increased electrical load in the provinces of Babylon and Karbala, which are experiencing an influx of millions of pilgrims” for a major Shiite Muslim religious commemoration.

The shutdown caused “a sudden and accidental loss of more than 6,000 megawatts on the grid,” the ministry added, with power plants also halting operations.

“Our teams are currently mobilized on the ground to gradually restore the grid over the next few hours,” the ministry said.

The northern Kurdistan region was spared. The autonomous territory has worked to modernize its power sector and was able to provide round-the-clock state electricity to a third of its population.

Authorities later announced that power was being restored in stages in the southern provinces of Dhi Qar and Maysan, with the strategic port city of Basra expected to have electricity back by dawn on Tuesday.

Electricity shortages are a frequent complaint in Iraq, which is sometimes rocked by protests when outages worsen in the hot summer months.

Heatwaves in Iraq are “more intense and more frequent” than they were in the 20th century, meteorological service spokesman Amer al-Jaberi told AFP, blaming climate change and human factors.