There is no good solution to the pain of Iraq, and there may be no good or sufficient solution to the enormously greater problem of atmospheric carbon and climate change. Mitigating climate change must be at the core of everything our society does for the foreseeable future – including the way the U.S. does foreign policy and foreign assistance. That includes America’s plans for ending the war in Iraq and addressing the challenges of the Middle East.
One of the Iraqi peoples’ greatest burdens is lack of sufficient, reliable electricity, a worse problem now than before the U.S. invasion. In the violence-ridden heat island that is much of Iraq, lack of electricity for cooling, refrigerating, lighting and running computers and TVs makes their lives even more grueling.
"Deploying additional forces [won’t] solve Iraq’s problems, but providing jobs, electricity and drinkable water [will]," U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, then commander of the Multinational Corps of Iraq, said in 2006.
According to a March 8 CBS News report, at the start of 2007 the U.S. had already spent over $4 billion on restoring electricity in Iraq – with very limited progress.
How much solar electric generation capacity could $4 billion buy? At a conservative cost of $10 per watt installed, it could by 400 megawatts of solar PV. At 3 kilowatts per home, that’s enough to power 133,300 homes!
When President Bush announced the troop surge last year, he said the initiative must go "beyond military operations," and ordinary Iraqis "must see visible improvements."
"But they won’t see lights at the flip of a switch until 2013, six years from now and 10 years after the war began," the New York Times reported in March. "That’s how long U.S. officials say it will take to fix the electricity, a distrubing timeline given that the restoration of basic and essential services is seen as a key element in gaining the confience and support of Iraqis.
Solar Electricity to the Rescue?
The U.S. should devote some of the estimated $225 million it spends a day in Iraq to purchase solar PV panels and components – same for solar water-heating.
Federal funds could be used to distribute the materials to Iraqi communities and businesses. This solar infrastructure might turn out to be the one unambiguously good thing that results from the gargantuan U.S. enterprise in Iraq.
It would also create badly needed jobs. "If I could drive down unemployment in this country," Chiarellis said, "our casualty figures would not be so high, nor would Iraqi casualties … nor the level of violence."
"The name of the game in Iraqi electricity is going local," suggests Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow and geopolitical analyst at the Brookings Institution. He told me, "At present the effort is dominated by diesel generators with all that requires in terms of difficult, dangerous supply lines and sooty air. Thinking solar may, if the economics work, go a long way toward improving this situation to the benefit of not just Iraqis but American forces presently involved in much of the fuel resupply effort."
A Vehicle for Hope & Healing
The U.S., with international allies including wealthy Persian Gulf states and the United Nations, can make a well-funded, large scale effort to solar-electrify Iraq a core part of a retooled reconstruction program.
Such a program might even make Iraq one of the world’s model solar nations – representing a peice of the badly needed sustainable energy infrastructure humanity needs to establish rapidly to head off an irreversible global climate crisis.
Raising the standard of living in poor countries while stabilizing or even reducing their fossil fuel emissions would be a wonderful core goal of international foreign assistance.
Professor Dieter Holm, director of ISES Africa and the Sustainable Energy Society of Southern Africa, believes that "solar energy is the vehicle for the democratization of power, [literally bringing] power and democracy to the people." In the case of Iraq, he told me, solar could bring "new hope after hell!"
This hope and healing, via a nation-scale installation of solar PV technology in Iraq that grows into a regional commitment to solar in the Middle East and a core of international foreign assistance programs worldwide, could also be the hope and healing of our warming planet.
++++
Gregory Wright is a writer and solar advocate. Contact him: greg@newciv.org
FROM Solar Today, a SustainableBusiness.com Content Partner.
Loading...