“Solar energy covers all our needs: the refrigerator, the TV, the refrigerator, the washing machine, the vacuum cleaner,” says Daniar Abdallah, 33, a Hazar Merd resident who switched to solar energy and regrets it.
“It helped us a lot,” said the father of two, who spent $2,800 in 2018 to install photovoltaic panels on his family’s home.
Despite its immense oil wealth, Iraq is struggling to supply enough electricity to its 43 million people after decades of clashes and sanctions, as well as endemic corruption and crumbling infrastructure.
And while the country enjoys more sunshine than most other countries, it has proved difficult to wean Iraq’s economy off fossil fuels, one of the topics of the upcoming COP28 climate talks in Dubai.
Although the country receives a third of its energy needs from neighboring Iran, there are still daily power outages, which worsen in the hot summer months, when temperatures hover around 50 degrees Celsius (120 Fahrenheit).
Hazar Merd’s silent silence is astonishing in a country where the roar of giant community turbines used to supply backup power is ubiquitous.
“We used to have a generator that broke down all the time” to compensate for power outages that can last 12 or 13 hours a day, said Abdallah, who works as a soldier for local Kurdish forces.
Several friends soon followed suit and now 17 of the 25 houses in his village have solar panels.
However, on a national scale, the use of solar energy remains uncommon.
In Sulaymaniyah, the second-largest city in Iraq’s northern Kurdish autonomous region, 500 of the 600,000 homes have solar panels, said Sirwan Mahmud, a spokesman for the province’s electritown department.
Solar power has seen “rapid growth,” he said, after the region’s parliament incentivized families in 2021 for the excess electricity they produce.
The region intends to build three Sun Force plants with a total capacity of 75 megawatts (MW), he added.
But this would be only a small construction of the 24,000 MW produced through Iraq’s power plants.
To end the power cuts, the country would want to produce at least 32,000 MW.
Despite its enormous potential, renewable energy remains underutilized in Iraq, despite enjoying more than 3,000 hours of sunshine in the 8,760 hours of the year.
“Iraq’s worst sun has nearly two-thirds more resources than Germany’s most productive sun,” said Ali al-Saffar, meteorological director at the New York-based Rockefeller Foundation.
A recent World Bank report noted that more than 98% of Iraq’s electricity is still generated from fossil fuels.
The government says it needs to harness green energy to meet a third of the country’s desires by 2030. But despite several primary projects announced with great fanfare, this has yet to materialize.
TotalEnergies says it expects to deliver “the first phase” of a 1,000 MW solar plant within two years.
In 2021, Baghdad signed an agreement with the Emirati company Masdar to build solar plants with a cumulative capacity of 1,000 MW.
To inspire renewable energy, Iraq’s Central Bank announced in 2022 the allocation of $750 million in near-zero-interest loans to Americans and corporations that adopt solar energy.
But the initiative “is stalled due to a lack of cooperation from banks,” according to Mohamed al-Duleimi, an expert on renewable energy.
Iraq lacks a “culture of the sun,” said Ali al-Ameri, director of Solar Energy Universe, which installs solar infrastructure.
This year, however, more people are turning to solar, he said, and his company is installing photovoltaic panels at a dozen sites.
“Prices start at $4,500 and can go up to $6,000,” he explained.
Its clients include academics and doctors, but also humanitarian agencies and farmers.
Since 2020, it has installed panels on 70 buildings, mostly homes, in Baghdad, neighboring Anbar province and the south.
Despite the slow progress, Iraq’s solar outlook may simply be an “opportunity to solve its chronic electricity shortages once and for all,” he added.