7cm fall in Kurdistan’s Dokan reservoir stalls hydropower restart
Shafaq News – Al-Sulaymaniyah
Kurdistan’s hydropower stations at Dokan and Darbandikhan failed to restart this week as declining water levels prevented electricity generation.
Rahman Khani, the Director General of Dams in the Kurdistan Region, told Shafaq News that technical teams made several attempts in recent days, but the turbines could not operate under the current reservoir levels. “A brief test at Dokan Dam produced 30 megawatts before engineers shut the unit down again after recording a seven-centimeter drop in one day.”
The situation is compounded by months of rapid depletion at Dokan Dam, the Kurdistan Region’s largest reservoir. Storage has fallen from 6.97 billion cubic meters to below 500 million due to drought, upstream reductions, and historically low inflows from Iran—levels officials say are the lowest since the dam’s construction.
Authorities warn that the decline has erased decades of reserve capacity, strained drinking-water supplies, and left hydropower production effectively impossible.
The Kurdistan Region is also suffering from a severe power shortage triggered by the recent attack on the Khor Mor gas field in the Chamchamal area, which halted gas supplies to multiple stations and cut overall generation by nearly 80 percent.
