ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — The electricity supply in Iraq’s central provinces has decreased after Iranian gas imports dried up with the arrival of winter, according to the spokesperson of Iraq’s Ministry of Electricity. “According to the deal made with Iran, they were supposed to send us 40 million cubic meters (mcm) of gas per day to Iraq, but they have reduced it to only 10 mcm, which has reduced our electricity production by 4000 megawatts,” spokesperson Ahmad Moussa told Rudaw on Wednesday. Iran supposedly cannot supply the full amount, because it needs more of the product domestically. “They said the weather has gotten cold in Iran, and we need more gas ourselves,” Moussa said of his conversations with authorities in Iran. “This reduction has mainly affected the capital city of Baghdad and the central provinces of Iraq, less so the southern provinces,” he added. Moussa added that the Ministry of Electricity has contacted the Ministry of Oil requesting help with the crisis “temporarily”. Iraq had signed a two-year contract with Iran renewing commitments to import Iranian gas for electricity, the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) reported back in June. Before this reduction, Iran exported 1200-1500 megawatts of electricity to Iraq on a daily basis, in addition to 38-40 million cubic meters of natural gas to feed several of Iraq’s power stations, according to Sayyid Hamid Hosseini, secretary general of Iran-Iraq Joint Chamber of Commerce. Iraq has long suffered from chronic outages and shortages of electricity in a country where summer temperatures reach 50 degrees Celsius. Rampant electricity shortages have in past years been a rallying call for protestors, most notably in the summer of 2018. In January, a spokesperson for Iraq’s Ministry of Electricity revealed that Iraq had signed a deal with the Arab Gulf Cooperation Council Interconnection Authority (GCCIA) for electricity imports in a Thursday report published by state-owned newspaper al-Sabaah. Iraq has met 80 percent of its obligations required in a deal to begin importing 500 megawatts of electricity from Gulf states, Moussa told state media back in July.
