Kurdistan region tackles electricity challenges and highlights production efforts

Shafaq News/ On Wednesday, the Kurdistan Region held its regular session headed by PM Masrour Barzani and in the presence of Deputy Speaker Qubad Talabani.

During the session, Minister of Electricity Kamal Muhammad presented a report highlighting the challenges facing the electricity system in Iraqi Kurdistan, precisely the problem of the general outage that the network was exposed to on the 30th of last month.

The Minister of Electricity indicated in the report that the Kurdistan Region currently produces 3,473 megawatts of electricity, confirming the return of the national system to normal and explaining that between 8 and 10 hours of provided to the citizens through electricity generation.

The Minister noted the ongoing efforts and projects undertaken by the Ministry to increase electricity production and denied rumors claiming that the Kurdistan Region sells nationally produced electricity to other regions in Iraq. He also clarified that electricity production in the Region would be distributed fairly to all areas of the Kurdistan Region.

Notably, the Region imports about 40% of its electricity from neighboring countries, mainly Iran and Turkey.

This dependence makes the Region vulnerable to fluctuations in supply and price changes in those countries.

In addition, much of the power generation infrastructure in the Region is old and inefficient, leading to high transmission losses and frequent breakdowns.