Solar-Powered Street Lights

It is official. The US Army brigade in Ramadi has now spent $1.94 million on solar-powered street lights. Or, more accurately, the Army has spent $1.94 million attempting to light up Ramadi with solar-powered street lights.


The saga of the solar-powered street lights began late this Spring when the provincial government featured a modest project for new street lights in the downtown area of the war damaged city. The solar-powered lights were to be an interim solution until the Ramadi director general (DG) of municipalities was able to repair or replace the preexisting street lights in the city as electricity service improved to the region. The military pounced on this brilliant plan, aiming to exploit it throughout the city. Starting as murmur, soon echoes of "Solar lights, solar lights, solar lights?? Solar Lights!" reverberated through the shabby concrete halls and into makeshift wooden cubicles, wafted over the radios, and permeated emails, spreadsheets, and PowerPoint slides. Somehow the very future of the city rested in the flourishing of solar-powered street lights. Maybe Iraqis too can learn to have the moral self-satisfaction of having Green public works initiatives. Within a month, Iraqi municipal workers, contractors, and engineers were bustling around the city developing pricey scopes of work and contracts for the ravenous military demand for more solar-powered street lights.


The first completed run of solar-powered street lights amounted to nothing more than a glowstick atop a shoddy fifteen foot pole. Another strip of sixty had only ten functional lights. The Iraqi DGs (director generals--municipal officials) wonder about our zealous adoption of a temporary solution, when already the electricity service is improving to the point when the existing infrastructure should be repaired. But we are paying out--solar lights are lucrative. It's a wonder the municipal employees don't quit working for the city to come build solar lights for the US Army. It was a point of personal pride in our unit that we had successfully stymied any installation of solar-powered street lights in our area of operations during our tenure.


UPDATE: I thought I had escaped the solar-powered street lights once and for all after leaving Ramadi. Not so. Camp Virginia, Kuwait has scores of gorgeous solar-powered streetlights (about eight feet apart, too). Being so closely spaced, they make superb road markers; illumination, however, comes from the noisy, gas-powered generator light systems placed along each row of solar-powered street lights.