Within days, the plant’s desperate engineers came up with a novel solution: They hooked up 170 twelve-volt car batteries to restart the plant’s turbines. To everyone’s amazement, including the engineers themselves, the impromptu kludge actually worked. "It was an abnormal situation," notes Rafiq Maliha, one of the plant’s managers, who holds a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering.

Triumphs, even small ones, are uncommon these days in Gaza, which has endured a devastating run of strife, death, and dysfunction. A three-week war that began in late December 2008 killed 1660 Palestinians and 13 Israelis and left 4000 homes and 80 government buildings wrecked or seriously damaged. Since 2007, Gaza’s 360 square kilometers have been controlled by Hamas, a militant Islamic group that much of the world, including the European Union and the United States, regards as a terrorist organization.

Conceived in 1994 during a short-lived interlude of relative tranquility that began after the Oslo Accords, the Gaza power plant, which operates under the official name of the Gaza Power Generating Co., was part of a larger blueprint to lessen Palestinian dependence on Israel for such basic municipal services as electricity, education, and security. But today, with the other parts of the blueprint long abandoned, the plant’s 100 or so engineers are reduced to operating the 140-megawatt plant in ways its designers never anticipated.

Some days, notes Maliha, the power plant doesn’t even have the fuel needed to provide transportation for its employees, a nightmare for a facility that requires 24-hour support. Other days, something as simple as a faulty temperature sensor can shut down operations, because the plant has no easy way to obtain a new one. "We managed to survive up till now, but things are becoming more difficult," says Maliha. "We try to manage with temporary solutions, but then the temporary becomes permanent, and suddenly you have a complete failure."

Like the territory itself, Gaza’s electrical system—and its lone power plant—seems stuck in a kind of chaotic limbo. Life for a plant engineer here is a daily struggle to keep the operation running amid chronic shortages of fuel, spare parts, expertise, and basic building materials. Somehow, this solitary power plant wheezes on. This is what engineering looks like at the edge, where engineers keep the lights on amid bombings, embargoes, intrigue, and instability in one of the world’s longest-simmering combat zones.

You approach the power plant in central Gaza on a dirt road in an area that seems to lack any modern infrastructure. Today, on a weekday afternoon in early June, the facility looks all but deserted. A cat is asleep in the guard station. A sign near the entrance to the plant, advertising the number of days with no accidents, hasn’t been updated since 2008. Maliha, who greets a visitor, looks exhausted. He’s been involved with the plant since its inception and is accustomed to patiently explaining its difficulties to visitors. An alarm goes off somewhere in the plant as he is speaking, and he doesn’t even pause.

With its four 24-MW diesel-fueled combustion turbines and two 22-MW steam units, this plant was the longtime dream of Palestinians who wanted to wean Gaza of its total dependence on Israel for power. "This plant was supposed to cover demand for the whole Gaza Strip," Maliha explains. But today, only half those turbines are working, and the plant is producing only about 60 out of a potential 140 MW.

The US $140 million project was troubled from the start. Construction had been under way for barely a year when the second Palestinian uprising, or intifada, began in 2000. Worsening relations between Israel and the Palestinian National Authority made any projects more difficult to complete, not to mention risky for private investors. Nor did the situation get any better when the plant began operating in 2002, shortly after one of the initial investors, the notorious U.S.-based energy firm Enron, collapsed.

Today one of the biggest problems is getting enough fuel. It’s one of the many problems you encounter running a power plant in a war zone. Since 2007, Israel has restricted the amount of fuel it rations to Gaza, leaving the plant to operate at only partial capacity. At one point in 2007, the European Union, which pays for the fuel brought into Gaza, cut off the supply because it was concerned Hamas was skimming money. Deliveries soon resumed, and the plant continues to get the rationed fuel. Under the original blueprint, the plant would have been fueled by natural gas, but today it is still dependent on liquid diesel fuel. "Everything here is temporary," Maliha says with a wry laugh. He estimates that the plant, which receives about 2.2 million liters of rationed diesel fuel per week, needs over twice that amount, about 4.9 million liters, to operate at full capacity. Without fuel, the power plant stops, and when the power plant stops, things start to break. "Fuel tanks without fuel become rusty, and they’re destroyed," Maliha says. The storage tanks grow rusty, the rust contaminates the fuel, and the contaminated fuel damages the equipment. Then the turbines shut down, leading to more failures when engineers try to start them up again.

Illustration:

Bryan Christie Design

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for illustration.

Perched atop a wooden pole on a Gaza City street lined with buildings still pockmarked by mortars from Israel’s recent military incursion, a maintenance worker at first glance appeared to be repairing a power line leading to a two-story building. But a split second later, the line dangled free—the building’s connection to the Gaza grid had just been severed.

Unlike GEDCo, a public utility, the power plant is a commercial operation that must produce and sell electricity to stay in business. The Gaza power plant has been operating at only partial capacity—today mostly because of the blockade. For the moment, only four of the plant’s six turbines are running. At one point, the power plant’s managers had hoped to add an additional six turbines to the facility, bringing total generation up to 280 MW. But now, because some of the plant’s transformers were damaged during the war, it cannot handle full output from even the working turbines. Siemens, the turbines’ manufacturer, sends its technicians to work at the plant, but only if the power plant pays a private security company to protect them.

Rebuilding after the most recent war, with key parts unavailable or in very short supply, demanded resourcefulness. GEDCo had to erect wooden poles to replace damaged medium-voltage steel poles. But even if GEDCo could get steel poles, it couldn’t obtain the concrete needed to set the poles, because as part of the economic blockade, Israel does not allow any concrete into Gaza, making it an especially prized commodity.

Major Guy Inbar, a spokesman for the Israeli defense ministry’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, which is responsible for Gaza issues, says Israel has not received any applications for cement or steel poles from the Palestinian power authority. And while some equipment was approved for the power plant, Inbar says, some other items were denied for what Israel determined were security concerns. Inbar acknowledges that the long list of needed items must be reviewed individually, which makes for a long wait.

The blockade has also led to shortages of certain wires and cables, so GEDCo has had to use whatever it has on hand. In many cases the cable sizes are inadequate for the loads, leading to excessive heat and high resistive losses. Lines that should be replaced are left in place with splices and connectors. Transformers are routinely overloaded, admits Suheil Skeik, GEDCo’s general manager. "We risk them by overloading, but we have no other way," he says.

For the power plant, the inability to get parts and supplies has been particularly challenging. Israel’s offensive has been over for nearly a year, but the power plant must still clear every spare part with Israeli authorities, a system that Maliha insists is unworkable. Sometimes the plant gets approval; sometimes it doesn’t. "If you are running a power plant, you need a continuous flow of spare parts and consumables," he notes.

Skeik’s radical solution is to eliminate Israel from the energy equation. Fueling the plant, he explains, means relying on Israel. But without energy and fuel from Israel, what is the future of the grid? "We look to Egypt as our solution," he maintains. But it’s hard to see how that would work, because Egypt also cooperates in the Gaza blockade. For several years, there have been plans to put in place ten 22-kilovolt feeder lines to increase the electricity supply from Egypt; but the project, which was to be funded by the Islamic Development Bank, has been put on hold practically from the day it was first proposed in 2003.

Israel continues to insist that the weekly fuel ration is enough. That fuel enables the plant to produce about 65 MW, according to Israel’s estimates; Inbar insists that this is "the needed amount for the humanitarian needs of the civil population." Assuming the situation remains stable, Israel will provide "enough power supply for the humanitarian needs of the people of Gaza." Israeli spokesman Inbar did not say how Israel determines the amount required for these needs.

The Palestinians see Israel’s actions differently. "The Israelis want everything closed down: electricity, materials, everything," says Skeik.

One thing is certain: The power situation, like the political situation, has reached a seemingly insurmountable impasse. "It was the first of its kind in the Palestinian National Authority," recalls Maliha of the power plant’s construction. "It was promising because at the beginning, there was talk about regional power sharing between different countries." Now, he says, all those dreams have evaporated. There are currently no plans for expansion.

Asked about the future, Maliha responds with an answer typical in Gaza these days. "You cannot make a plan; there is no plan," he says. "You live for the day."

This article originally appeared in print as "Powerless in Gaza."

About the Author

Sharon Weinberger is a journalist, a reporter for Wired’s award-winning national security blog, Danger Room, and the author of Imaginary Weapons: A Journey Through the Pentagon’s Scientific Underworld. She examines the opposite end of the high-tech spectrum in "Powerless in Gaza", a look at the engineers who try to keep the lights on in that war-torn region. Her reporting trip to Gaza was supported by The Nation Institute’s Investigative Fund.

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