“A general power outage occurred at 4:00 am today due to a problem with exporting gas. Electrical teams were able to resolve the problem and the power situation has returned to normal,” the ministry said on Facebook.
A “total shutdown” struck the Kurdistan Region’s power supply early in the morning due to a gas leak at Dana Gas, which produces a large amount of the Region’s natural gas.
“At 4:30 there was a gas leak problem in the Dana Gas company, first a part of the electrical sources were turned off and then it became a total shutdown,” Ghalib Mohammed, director of electricity control in Sulaimani province, told Rudaw.
The dramatic drop in power generation came as temperatures fell across the Kurdistan Region to under ten degrees Celsius.
The Khor Mor gas field in Sulaimani province’s Chamchamal, operated by the UAE-based Dana Gas, produces over 400 million standard cubic feet of gas per day and supplies gas to power stations in Chamchamal, Sulaimani, and Erbil through its pipelines.
When the national supply cuts out, people rely on private diesel-fueled generators that are costly and polluting, and unreliable electricity is a frequent headache in the Kurdistan Region.
High demand, financial problems, and shortage of gas supply mean power stations in the Kurdistan Region cannot always operate at full capacity and the electricity ministry has been incapable of providing round-the-clock power.
In December of last year, a similar power outage occurred in the Kurdistan Region and was blamed on a technical problem.
The latest outage came after Iran announced over twenty days ago that it was suspending gas exports for 15 days to do some repairs to export pipelines. However, the exports to Iraq have not been resumed and the Iraqi electricity ministry spokesperson on Saturday said that repair work by the Iranians is not complete.
