For years, the day in Kulak ended when the generator powered down. Like thousands of villages across Iraq, this small farming community in the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region lived to the faltering rhythm of an erratic power supply: a few hours of electricity, then the water pumps stopped, refrigerators warmed and children put down their books.
Today, Kulak runs on the sun. Solar panels harness its energy, batteries store the excess and residents have power 24/7. The change is visible beyond the homes: water pumps keep running, and cold storage gives farmers more control over when they sell their harvest.
This is the part of the energy transition the global climate conversation too often overlooks. Solar hardware is cheap; the world has learned how to install it. What matters is what comes after the panels go up: building the local capacity to keep the systems running and using reliable power to support farms, livelihoods and communities.
The energy transition will not be won in conference halls. It will be won, or lost, in places like Kulak.
Iraq’s rural energy crisis
Iraq’s energy story is usually told as a paradox. It is one of the world’s great oil producers, yet rural communities still endure daily power cuts. Summers now regularly push past 50 degrees, and the United Nations ranks Iraq among the nations most vulnerable to climate change. Drought has emptied farmland. Heat has made whole regions harder to live in. Rural families face a quiet, grinding choice between staying on land that can no longer sustain them or joining the drift towards overcrowded cities.
These pressures do not respect provincial boundaries. They are shared across Iraq, from the marshes of the south to the mountains of the north. They demand responses that work for the whole country.
For remote communities, decentralised power should not simply be treated as a stopgap while they wait for the grid. It can be part of the long-term answer.
Beyond electrification
Kulak is one of five villages in the Kurdistan region electrified through a solar initiative that pairs new infrastructure with local training and agricultural development. Residents are trained to operate and maintain their own systems, while research is under way into how reliable power can support local production.
Energy is treated not as a gift to be received but as an asset to be managed. That means looking beyond electricity itself to what it can enable: cold storage that allows farmers to hold their harvest for better prices, irrigation that no longer depends on diesel and processing that adds value before crops ever leave the village.
That distinction matters, because the graveyard of development is full of well-intentioned infrastructure. Anyone who has worked in this field has seen the solar array gathering dust because no one was trained to fix an inverter, or the water project abandoned when the foreign NGO moved on.
Sustainability is not a slogan; it is a design choice. Building local capability into a project from day one is the difference between a photo opportunity and a future.
Building the transition from the ground up
There is a broader argument here for the climate movement.
The energy transition is overwhelmingly narrated from the top down: through COP plenaries, G7 communiques and the financing pledges of wealthy nations, many of them unmet. Yet for hundreds of millions of people in the Global South, the transition will arrive, if it arrives at all, through decentralised solutions built close to the ground.
Rural Iraq will not wait decades for grid expansion to reach every valley. It does not have to. Distributed solar suits these communities better than centralised generation ever did, while local institutions can move at a speed that multilateral programmes rarely match.
There is also a quieter point about who gets to act on climate.
The prevailing image of climate action in the Middle East is the megaproject: vast desert solar farms, futuristic cities and sovereign wealth funds. Those have their place. But electrifying farming villages one by one represents a different kind of ambition, one rooted in the belief that Iraqis themselves, in all their diversity, can build the country’s energy future rather than wait for it to be delivered.
Local involvement matters particularly in places where reliable electricity is tied not only to household comfort but to whether farms can irrigate crops, preserve produce and remain economically viable.
Iraq has thousands of rural communities, and scaling this model will require partners, patient financing and supportive policy at every level of government. The agricultural research is promising but young.
On my last visit to Kulak, I was struck less by the panels than by what surrounded them: the cold store, the working pumps, the sense of a community planning for next season rather than next month.
The lights staying on is the least of it. What has really been switched on is the future tense.
If Iraq’s energy transformation is built like this across the whole country, village by village and from the ground up, it will be more durable than anything imposed from above. That means investing not only in the systems themselves, but in the people who will maintain them and the farms, businesses and livelihoods that reliable power can support.
The world’s climate diplomats could do worse than pay attention.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
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