The announcement was made during PM Haider al-Abadi’s regular cabinet meeting held on Tuesday.
Abadi reiterated that his vision is electricity 24 hours per day for Iraqis at a reasonable price in-line with the users’ consumption, the statement added.
He noted that it is not reasonable to continue to waste money without addressing “some corrupt beneficiaries of the continuing electricity crisis,” without specifying further.
Iraq has attempted to boost its aging power grid which has been affected by decades of war and political instability.
The Council of Ministers announced in a statement its plans for 430 people to be employed at the Wasit Thermal Power Station in the province by the same name near the city of Zubaydea, and awarded 287 related maintenance, transport and distribution contracts.
Wasit was constructed in 2012 with the support of the Chinese Shaghai Company, and is the largest thermal power station in Iraq.
On Wednesday, Iraq’s Minister of Electricity Qasim al-Fahdawi visited Erbil.
In war-torn Mosul, most of the right and left bank areas still have no electricity, according to a recent report by the UN Human Settlements Program.
"While ISIS is retreating, it has booby-trapped many of the important stations with improvised explosive devices (IEDs), including the 400 KV station which supplies 20% of Mosul’s energy," the report detailed.
"Other substations are currently mostly out of operation because of a lack of required resources (oil, gas)," it added.
According to the United Nations Development Programme, Iraqi households receive 14.6 hours of electricity daily through public or private generators, and 90 percent of households utilize private generators.
Iraq's peak electricity demand was 2.1 gigawatts in the summer and the grid is only able to supply about 1.3 gigawatts, Reuters reported in April of 2016.
