Scorching summer and the ‘rogue conscience’

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All the reassurances of Ministry of Electricity officials that the situation is under control and that there will be no programmed outages next summer, that is, after two months, are incorrect, as the outages began days ago, and Al-Nuzha and Al-Mansouriya were the first victims. We, and dozens of others, have warned of the coming crisis. The power network is overburdened, the transformers are exhausted, the pressure continues, and consumption is rising.

The Ministry will not be able to meet all of the state’s energy needs in light of the increasing expansion in the distribution of residential homes, by the thousands, and the expectation of an increase in the number of expatriates. The lack of any plans to build new electrical projects, knowing that contracting and building them to begin their work requires a period of no less than seven years, if we start moving today. We faced, almost a decade ago, something similar to the current situation, as the power cuts included all areas of Kuwait. It was a sad tragedy in a country awash with money, and of course the government did not learn anything from that experience.

On that day, the leadership issued orders to do everything possible to avoid the problem of power outages, so the ministry, in its most wasteful era, disbursed 400 million dinars to everyone who submitted an offer to supply electricity stations or generators, even if he was a seller of carrot juice, so scrap stations were imported from countries, remnants of the Soviet Union.

The terrible deficit was actually averted, for a few weeks, then several stations and transformers stopped working one after another, and began to burn or explode and caused casualties, which was due to corruption of open procurement and it was a scandal, at that time, from which all accused companies escaped without any penalty, for known reasons, known to everyone and as a result 400 million dinars of public money were found their way in the pockets of some people, and the same crime is expected to be repeated soon. It is clear from the minutes of the last National Assembly, and from a speech by MP Abdul Wahab Al-Issa, that he warned, as we have warned dozens of times, against indifference to the size of the problem, and that no one wants to comprehend the scale of the crisis that Kuwait will face soon, as it is large and frightening.

The end is inevitably coming, and reliance on the Gulf interconnection will not cover the need, as the electricity sector, and the public sector as a whole, has died clinically, due to its inability to solve any problem, especially this tired and confusing file, which, at least, the last five electricity ministers chose to ignore, due to their inability to do anything about it. The Ministry is in a well-known hellish cycle, and the deficit is on the rise, as it will reach 1,300 megawatts by the end of this year, 1,400 megawatts the following year, and 1,600 in 2026, and all of this is without taking into consideration the need for new hospitals, university cities, and other huge projects.

This is n addition to the need for energy for tens of thousands of residential homes in the new areas. Note that the power was delivered to more than one area in Al-Mutla’a, and often with the intervention of representatives whose feelings are hurt by seeing a woman’s bare shoulders, and they do not care about the problem of the terrible shortage of electrical power, if they do not seek to increase its deficit. The problem is that the two technical ministries are partly run by Sharia graduates and during their reign all maintenance contracts, whether for power plants or roads, ended, and they did not say a word! The issue is serious, and tens of thousands of citizens and residents will be affected. Therefore, I will reconnect the electricity generator to my house, after removing it for a while.

By Ahmad alsarraf
e-mail: [email protected]

This news has been read 1258 times!