Power in Libya

It’s hard to hide high tension power lines from a satellite.    More often than not, the power lines lead you to important things if you follow them.   So I was pretending I’m an intelligence analyst and mapping out the pipelines and power lines and such, in Google Earth.    First complication is many of the photos are from 2002, before the real development started in the desert….

One of the complaints I’ve heard is that Quaddaffi is spending all the oil money on Tripoli, and Benghazi is turning into a horrible city with raw sewage in the streets, and only a single Italian era sewage treatment plant.

Here is a really big high tension power line in Western Libya as far as I have tracked it:

Most of what we consider 20th century comforts (like air conditioning) depends on electric power.   That power line doesn’t seem to connect to anything sinister (yet), but provides electric power along a major road that connects the cities of Western Libya.   That’s the kind of stuff you have to spend money on to build a place where development can take place.

Over in Benghazi, I can’t spot anything comparable.   Whatever power there is probably just generated locally – there isn’t any sense of a “power grid” connecting the cities along the coast.    Perhaps there is something to this claim….  it might also offer a compromise.  You can build a lot of miles of high voltage power lines for the price of one F15E.