KHOR ZUBAYR, Iraq — When the United States fires up the last generator at this remote power plant this week, it will mark the conclusion of one of the most frustrating episodes in the effort to rebuild Iraq's infrastructure.
A pile of gray metal swarming with construction workers in the deserts of southern Iraq, the Khor Zubayr generating station is the final power plant being built under Washington's ill-fated $4-billion attempt to restore Iraq's electrical supply to its prewar level.
The massive U.S. effort will leave behind this legacy: Iraqis will actually have, on average, fewer hours per day of electricity in their homes than they did before the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.
"The money was not effective," Muhsin Shalash, Iraq's minister of electricity, said in an interview. "The contracting was wrong. The whole planning was wrong.... It's a big problem."
U.S. officials have blamed insurgent attacks, unchecked demand and the poor conditions of Iraq's power plants for hobbling the bid to restore electricity. But interviews with dozens of U.S. and Iraqi officials reveal that poor decisions by the United States also played a significant role.
Perhaps most serious was the decision to expand a program begun under Saddam Hussein to install dozens of natural-gas-fired electrical generators, U.S. and Iraqi officials said. Iraq has such gas in abundance, but it uses only a fraction of it. The rest is burned off during oil production.
The U.S. spent hundreds of millions of dollars to purchase and install natural-gas-fired generators in electricity plants throughout Iraq. But pipelines needed to transport the gas weren't built because Iraq's Oil Ministry, with U.S. encouragement, concentrated instead on boosting oil production to bring in hard currency for the nation's cash-starved economy.
In at least one case, the U.S. paid San Francisco-based Bechtel Corp. $69 million for a natural-gas-fired plant that was never built, according to State Department documents and U.S. officials.
All told, of 26 natural gas turbines installed at seven plants in Iraq -- ranging in cost from a few million dollars to more than $40 million -- only seven are burning natural gas, reconstruction officials said.
Faced with widespread power shortages, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the State Department decided to reconfigure many of the generators to burn a different fuel, an expensive process that decreased generation capacity and increased maintenance.
