Days Will Soon Be Brighter Thanks to Kabul’s Power Plant Hero

When a switch is flipped this month and the main power plant here comes to life after a decade in mothballs, energy-starved citizens will have Gullaghon Hairan to thank.

For more than a decade, Hairan protected the plant he manages in northwest Kabul from marauding squads of moujahedeen and Taliban looters. His largely successful efforts provide a rare point of light in a country where the public infrastructure for the most part lies in ruins.

While the Kabul plant’s 44 megawatts of power is a mere spark compared with the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station -- whose two working 1,120-megawatt nuclear reactors provide power for 2.2 million homes in the Southland -- its recommissioning will increase this capital’s power supply by more than 60%.

“This is my baby, this plant, and when the turbines start up again, I will be immensely proud,” Hairan said.

During the plant’s shutdown, the manager hid tools and spare parts in underground culverts, guarded transformers and used sandbags to protect the control room from rockets and gunfire. He was jailed for 11 days in 1997 for refusing to turn over copper transmission cables to Taliban authorities, who wanted to resell the parts for scrap in Pakistan and Iran.

He and his staff lived alongside the turbines and maintained them in near-working order long after diesel fuel dried up in 1992 and forced the shutdown.

The result is that the rehabilitation of the plant -- nearly completed by the multinational company Alstom and financed by a $2-million World Bank grant -- has been relatively brief and inexpensive. Building a new plant from scratch would have cost at least $75 million and taken years, experts say.

The rehabilitation is heartening for international donors, such as Germany and the World Bank, that have committed large sums to rebuilding a semblance of an electric system for this war-ravaged city. They see a viable power source as crucial to the nation’s recovery from more than two decades of plunder and violence.

“The dedication of the engineers running that plant really deserves commendation,” said Alistair McKechnie, the World Bank’s director for Afghanistan.

Unfortunately, the rehabilitation of the rest of the electricity grid in Kabul and elsewhere in Afghanistan won’t be so easy.

What was once Kabul’s other main power plant stands in ruins in a southwestern neighborhood, stripped of valuable parts, its control room a shambles, its fuel tanks shot up by vandals.

Nearly half of the country’s power transmission lines have been stolen from their pylons. Large numbers of transformers been ripped out of concrete housings and carted away, and electrical substations have been dismantled for parts.

The upshot is that Kabul, population 2.5 million, has a power supply that in the U.S. would serve a town of only 70,000. Electricity for the capital, generated by nearby hydroelectric plants, is available just a few hours a day, and a mere 4% of Afghanistan’s population has access to electricity at all.

Hairan couldn’t save everything. The Taliban took 17 maintenance vehicles.

“They told me that if I didn’t give the vehicles to them, they would take me out for a ‘desert trial,’ ” the 49-year-old manager said. “That meant they were taking you out in the desert to shoot you. So I gave them the keys.”

The World Bank and other organizations also are concerned about widespread deforestation in a country where most people depend on wood for heat.

Along with insecurity and bad roads, the lack of electric power is among the most daunting impediments to an economic renaissance in Afghanistan, said Christiane Hieronymus, a counselor with the German Embassy here. Her government has committed $30 million in grants toward rebuilding the system.

“You aren’t going to get private companies to invest in Afghanistan without a reliable source of energy,” she said. “People can’t work. Ministries can’t communicate. Factories can’t operate.”

The Germans are financing the repair of turbines at the two problem-plagued hydroelectric power plants that have been supplying the capital’s power since the diesel-fueled main plants were shut down. Once those repairs are completed, Kabul will receive an additional 50 megawatts of power.

But the problems go deeper than just power generation. According to a recent World Bank study, Afghanistan loses half of what little power it generates either to thieves or through faulty transmission equipment.

There is also the difficulty of paying for diesel fuel for the rehabilitated plant, which Hairan estimates will cost $2.5 million a month. Although the World Bank has promised to cover that cost this winter, the future could be problematic for a government forced to beg international donors for 85% of its meager $460-million annual budget. Customer fees cover only a small fraction of the costs.

His optimism tempered by the experience of living too many years amid anarchy and violence, Hairan sees a recovery ahead, even prosperity.

“We have problems, mainly too many people with guns who don’t obey the law and don’t want to see progress in the country,” he said. “But we have a lot of possibilities. We have gas in the north that could fuel new power plants. We have the potential for thousands of megawatts more in hydroelectric power. And we have many good people.”