www.enreport.com

Wikipedia
As of December 2011, the output of electricity sector in Iraq averages more than 8,500 MW, while the demand is typically more than 14,000 MW

There is a growing problem of electricity shortage in Iraq. If you check the Brooking's index for Iraq, you will see "Average hours of electricity/day" progress.
But the story does not start here.... It was chronic for such a long time

In February of last year(2011)'s popular demonstrations took place in Baghdad and the various provinces demanding better services in the forefront of electricity and asked Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's Hundred Days give him a chance to address these problems, most notably the electricity (average hours served) and the electricity crisis has aggravated rather than lessened.

According to Darel Hayat:

that the rate of the highest level of production of electricity for any month in the history of the Ministry of Electricity of Iraq was about 5,500 MW and that was in August (August 2011) ,When you add electricity imported by Iraq from outside its system (Iran and commercial stations in Kurdistan and commercial vessels in the Shatt al-Arab) the rate of supply of electricity in August 2011 is about 7900 MW which is also higher by about 26 percent than it was in ent of what it was in the same month of 2010 (4800 MW)

Iraq seems to depended on imports of electricity to a very large extent
Currently it is worse but will be worse by Summer of 2012, Mubasher claims:
Problems are:
1. Transmission sistem is old and needs rehab
2. Technical flaws in distribution network
3. Power plants to be built

It is expected that the Iraqi demand will hit 16000 MW, not even this capacity with imports will be enough...
Mubasher also claims the supply and demand is unmatched by 10000 MW.
Iraq needs a capacity of 18000 MW and you see lots of new contracts signed in the news


Ref:
http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Files/Centers/Saban/Iraq%20Index/index.pdf
http://international.daralhayat.com/internationalarticle/358483
Wikipedia
http://www.mubasher.info/portal/ISX/getDetailsStory.html?goToHomePageParam=true&siteLanguage=ar&storyId=2007257

According to TEİAŞ, Turkish electricity system produced a record

• 35446.1 MWe (Momentarily) - 16th Jan
  
• 34971 MWe (hourly average) - 16 th Jan
  
• 0.71 TWh maximum daily consumption in 12th Jan 2012

The previous record and alltime high maximum peak production happened on
28th July 2011 - 36112.4 MWe at 14:30 local time

Sabah newspaper also claims, maximum daily consumption has occured as
- 180 million m3 /day
- 170 million m3/day

This is due to extreme cold affecting Anatolia and Tracia...

According to TEİAŞ figures by the end of 2011 Turkish Electricity Installed Capacity is 53050 MW. By the end of 2010 it was 49524 MW. So it is at least 3526 MW additional capacity comissioned in 2011. Wind capacity by the end 2011 is 1691 MW.

In terms of power generation, there is a 8.9% increase in electricity demand increasing from 210.4 TWh to 229.3 TWh. The monthly breakdown of demand and its comparison YoY is here:



Source : www.teias.gov.tr

Recently I have completed a study on the effect of Carbon prices on Turkish electricity prices. Here is my result (Electricity supply curve MW vs $cent/kWh)

On Feb. 2nd 2011 :

A trio of events - loss of supply, higher demand and maintenance outages - led to Wednesday's emergency rolling blackouts across Texas and spiking power prices as the grid operator for most of the state struggled to accommodate a brutal winter storm.

Here is my collection of events from various links...
In 2008, Texas has been on the edge of a rolling blackout.

"On February 26, 2008, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) called for an Emergency Electric Curtailment Plan (EECP) at 18:41 due to a worsening imbalance between generation and load which led to a decline in system frequency"

Read here (http://www1.eere.energy.gov/windandhydro/pdfs/43373.pdf)

In 2011, (Feb 2 & Feb 3) Texas has suffered from blackouts. The Oil Drum has a nice summary of the events : ( http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7449 )
A summary of events is available from this site : (http://www.oncor.com/news/newsrel/detail.aspx?prid=1297)

"Wednesday’s peak demand is currently projected to be more than 54,000 MW between 8-9 p.m. , and more than 58,000 – which would be a new winter record – between 7-8 a.m. on Thursday. The current winter peak demand record is 56,334 MW which occurred Feb. 2, between 7 and 8 p.m.
The grid continues to have about 2,700 MW of generation capacity unavailable because of unplanned or forced outages."

These 2700 MW of generating capacity are probably these two plants:

Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst said the Luminant-owned 1,640 MW Oak Grove plant east of Temple and the 1,137 MW Sandow plant near Rockdale were among the plants knocked offline by the storm. Oak Grove suffered a broken pipe and Sandow was hampered by a frozen pipe. Allan Koenig, communications director for Luminant, said its Oak Grove and Sandow power plants "accounted for just a small percentage of the 50 units and 7,000 megawatts."

So it was cold weather, pipes and low pressure on natural gas lines:

Wednesday. Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst said this is something that “should not happen.” Dewhurst said he was told that water pipes at two plants, Oak Grove and Sand Hill, forced them to cut electricity production. Natural gas power plants that should have provided back up had difficulty starting due to low pressure in the supply lines, also caused by the cold weather.

I am not quite sure about this:

But, Fraser said, some power cuts affected some stations for compressing natural gas — so without power they couldn't pump gas, causing some gas power plants to go offline

The complaints followed :

"The blackouts left many people angry and frustrated. Cuellar said Oncor’s call center has been overwhelmed with about 60,000 calls an hour."

Also a family blamed these outages for causing their son's death

So the market worked and prices soared to 3000$/ MWh

As a result of the outages and demand, real-time power prices peaked around $3,000/MWh during some intervals Wednesday afternoon.

Average prices at this time of year normally would be less than $100/MWh, Doggett said.

Emergency measures started:

In addition to the default Energy Emergency Alert 0, or normal operations, there are four EEA levels: EEA Level 1, EEA Level 2A, EEA Level 2B and EEA Level 3, which is the most extreme.

ERCOT first contacted market participants at 4:45 am CST on Wednesday to warn the companies of inclement weather. ERCOT declared EEA Level 2A at 5:17 am

Less than a half-hour later, ERCOT declared EEA Level 3 at 5:43 am, at which point the grid operator asked distributors to shed firm load of 1,000 MW, said ERCOT spokeswoman Dottie Roark.

A timeline and detailed discussion is available from here:

More information about Texas home heating is available here

As a final reading, I offer "Normal Accident Theory" from NASA:

Failure in one part (material, human, or organization) may
coincide with the failure of an entirely different part. This
unforeseeable combination can cause cascading failures of
other parts.
In complex systems these possible combinations are practically
limitless.

First of all check:
http://www.teias.gov.tr/yukdagitim/kuruluguc.xls

You will see that Turkish Installed Capacity is: 44472.5 MWs (as of this month). You can also the wind energy column to make sure that it is updated:): 738 MW

Then check: http://www.teias.gov.tr/AylikElektrikIstatistikleri/AylikElektrikIstatistikleri.xls

you will see that 2009 on month by month basis lower than 2008.

Then see the latest statistics from TEİAS regarding "production capacity and peaks" here
http://www.teias.gov.tr/istatistik2008/14.xls


From the last column check that
Installed capacity @ 2008: 41817 MW
Peak load @2008 : 30842 MW
See the "Gross Demand" and "Firm Production" columns

Result:
We didn't have such a big problem in 2008. Our Installed Capacity is now 2600 MW higher but our demand and peak is 4% lower than 2008. The hardest years for Turkish system are the drought years, it resembles Norway's system in that sense due to high hydro capacity.

As a rule of thumb : (safe side-approximation)
Multiply the installed capacity by 4650 hours for higher scenario 4500 for lower scenario(capacity utilization sort of thing, this is a rough approximation, use Enerji Ekonomisi by Behçet Yücel for detailed calculation- and also note that system has the ability to achieve more than 5000 hours average).

If the resulted number is less than the expected demand then it means the system is in stress.

So
44472.5 MW * 4500 hours = 200 TWh
44472.5 MW * 4650 hours = 206.8 TWh

Expected demand for 2009 is 194 TWhs.
Expected demand for 2010 is 206.6 TWhs.

So without any additional capacity for the next year this capacity should be enough till the end of 2010 even for the first 6 months of 2011. I personally expect Turkey's installed capacity to reach close to the 50000 MW in 2012

I have never heard of Pulse Detonation Technology. But GE's working on it to increase the efficiency of gas turbines. Check the interview

• it would take more than 400 years of biodiesel use to "pay back" the carbon emitted by directly clearing peat for palm oil
• The grain it takes to fill an SUV tank with ethanol could feed a hungry person for a year;
• first new U.S. reactor is only scheduled for 2017
• average U.S. household now has 26 plug-in devices
• Only 4 percent of the energy used to power a typical incandescent bulb produces light; the rest is wasted
• China is expected to build more square feet of real estate in the next 15 years than the United States has built in its entire history, and it has no green building codes or green building experience.
• modern American refrigerators use three times less energy than 1970s models
  
  Baris's note : such a shame : "we can subtract a coal-fired megawatt every time we add a wind-powered megawatt". Coal works 6500-7000 hours/year, where wind hardly sees 3000 hours/year. It's capacity factor!

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/08/12/seven_myths_about_alternative_energy?page=full

Pretty interesting piece to read:

China's economy grew at an annualized 6.1 percent rate in the first quarter, and
7.9 percent in the second. Yet electricity usage, a key indicator in industrial
growth and a harder metric to manipulate, declined 2.2 percent in the first six
months of the year.

Ref:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/09/03/how_china_cooks_its_books?page=0,1

A professor fed up with his wife's phone beeping for low battery came up with this idea, which is not very complex. It is charging by induction I guess. But there is a video and pdf file to see.
Video: http://www.ted.com/talks/eric_giler_demos_wireless_electricity.html?CNN=YES
PDF: http://www.witricity.com/pdfs/4.0_home_news_2008_03-04.pdf

According the Wall Street Journal,

• 4.4% electricity demand drop in the largest US power market (consisting of13 states east of Mississippi)
• Average spot price in the same region drops by 40%. ($61.72/ MWh from $129.48/Mwh)

"Generally, the declines in demand and prices are the most precipitous and most sustained seen in the United States since the 1950s."

Ref:

IEEE Spectrum, 12 August 2009

NPR has this web page for visualizing the US Electric Grid, power plants, wind, solar maps.

• 7% of the passengers are using rail systems


• Rail mass transport system is 55 km and consumes 70 million kWh
  
• By 2012, Istanbul rail system will reach 230 km, consuming 450 million kWh

London Metro is consuming 1.17 TWh (Billion kWh) per annum

References:

While surfing on the net to find some interactive pages about Gridwise Goodwatts, I found the following pages. Building dashboards are interactive webpages that show you the resources you use ( electricity, water, gas) as well as solar generation and water recycling (grey water.). They have a starter package and some of their customers are big names (Like Yahoo). The current use of this technology may be to improve energy use of people, but this is step forward for smart grid-metering technologies. There is a link to the demo page too.
Lucid Design Group explains some of their services as follows :

".... features an easy-to-understand, web-based display for providing occupants with real-time feedback on resource use. Check out your consumption right now, or look at consumption patterns over time. See how many dollars you're spending or pounds of carbon dioxide you're emitting into the atmosphere. Go a step further and instantly compare your building's usage with another monitored building, or launch a competition and rival your friends and coworkers to reduce their consumption."

They also have a demo page for you to see what other things is possible with the starter kit. You can compare per person consumption, between different buildings and etc. 5 stars

http://www.luciddesigngroup.com/
Demo: http://www.buildingdashboard.com/demo/starter/
Other dashboards: http://buildingdashboard.com/clients/uvm/davis/ , Cubolder , EcoManor, Yahoo , SweetWater

Maybe a bit of history but the following numbers worth a look. This is published in June, 2008. Dolar is appreciated since then and commodity prices have collapsed.

Check this report (Page 11)
"What do all these cost increases mean for the cost of building a new generating
plant?"


"No one knows precisely. It’s difficult to get consistent and trustworthy numbers about plant costs, both because they are commercially sensitive and because the assumptions behind them vary greatly. The numbers reflected on the slide come from a variety of sources and include different assumptions about, for example, location or exactly what facilities are included in the estimate. To take one example: Two recent nuclear procurements in South Carolina and Georgia produced cost estimates of $5,100 and $6,400 per kW, respectively, for the same technology. We have been told that most of the difference may be due to different uses of Allowances for Funds Used during Construction – AFUDC."


Source:http://www.ferc.gov/legal/staff-reports/06-19-08-cost-electric.pdf

One of the implications of the recession is the big drops in electricity demands. In the developing countries, we see electricity demand drops followed by drops at industrial activity statistics. Here we see a basic example of economic activity(export rate is an indicator of Chinese economy) and electricity demand.

This news (China hit by massive drop in exports) from Financial Times says :
"Chinese exports plunged 25.7 per cent in February compared with a year ago, much higher than analysts had expected, as the global economic crisis began to take its full toll on the country’s export sector."

You should also check the following line:
"China’s exports have decreased for four months in a row, but until February the rate of decline had been much slower than seen in other Asian countries with large export sectors. .... The trade surplus, which has been at record levels for the last four months, also shrank sharply from $39.1bn to $4.84bn."

This reminded me the news from last month about a drop in Chinese electricity demand. Last month(Jan 2008), we have seen a 13% drop in Chinese electricity demand:

"Major power producers generated only 250.3 million megawatt hours of electricity last month, falling 13 percent from a year earlier, the China Daily reported. This is the fourth consecutive month that electricity generation in the country declined".
Source: China Post

Also read this one from Xinhua:

"However, the decline was smaller than in November and December, when power use fell 8.6 percent and 8.93 percent, respectively. According to CEC, the slowing pace of decline was a sign of economic recovery, as industrial use accounts for about 75 percent of total consumption. "

If you check Chinese state grid web site (http://www.sgcc.com.cn/) , you will see that the graphs (English / Statistics) are not updated for a long time

One of the many questions regularly discussed in Turkey is whether the energy demand projections are faulty or there is an "age-old" program that doesn't fit today's world. To challenge this question and to show that results are a product of inputs, I made an approximation to Turkish Energy Ministry's MAED results of 2004. The following excel sheet is a result of my work. What I basically did was to take the published forecasts from the ministry's web site and make the appropiate approximations. By permission, I posted it on several forums. And no one criticized it, and I received emails for how to use the model or methodology!
The main point in this work is as long as you put economic realisations model corrects itself. At the end even some Nobel price winning economists do not owe their success to that software or this software but a bunch of simple equations.
The following forecast assumes 2009 is not a negative growth year.
My forecast for March is as follows (for total energy):

And electricity demand is as follows


Excel file is here, use with permission ( The economic and demographic growth rates are not reflecting the real values)

Turkish electricity consumptions by sectors can be reached from TEDAS website. The latest year is 2007

You can also reach the Excel file that I prepared from this link.

The important thing in this graph is the robust growth in services and industry sectors. Of course, when looking into 2009, we will miss that year dearly. In services sector, especially hotels and tourism may be a bing contributor to this demand. Household consumptions however is more balanced and with a slower than economic growth rate.

It may sound stupid to you, but this is actually true. Too many wind turbines may really slow down earth's rotation, but not to significantly. From Yahoo Answers :

"The effect on the Earth's rotation should be less than any effect on the wind. It wouldn't be significant and it might not even be measurable. Besides global climate change from burning coal to generate electricity will effect the Earth far more than the potential lose or gain of a picosecond in a day caused by wind turbines."

You can also check another discussion at Discovery Community website.
This is the basic problem with generating energy, like Heisenberg's Uncertainity Principle , when you try to use one kind of technology to harness an innocent energy type, you change other things.
But still, the key point is to have the minimal impact!