31 March 1999

The Good News from Egypt and Jordan!

Dear GENI Friend,

Last month you learned about the electrification of South Africa and the interconnection between India and Pakistan. While these stories rarely make headlines, the impact of this development will benefit the daily lives of millions of people.

Today is another great story — that has been years in the making. The new King Abdullah of Jordan and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak inaugurated an underwater high-voltage cable between the two Arab nations. And the engineers have plans to expand this power pool by 2002 networking Syria, Turkey, Lebanon and Iraq!

A bit of GENI history here will inform you to how we work:

1. Six years ago, Michael Fisher and I encouraged this Middle East grid at the World Energy Conference in Spain
2. In 1994, GENI helped coordinate an IEEE panel of Middle Eastern power experts, which was subsequently published in the Power Engineering Review in December.
3. We met with Egypt's Energy Minister during the 1994 United Nations Conference in Cairo
4. Our 1997 newsletter included our 1995 letter to Shimon Peres and all other Middle Eastern leaders to the benefits of the electrical integration of the region.

Did we cause this Jordan-Egyptian project to be built? Hardly. But we certainly pushed, educated, provoked and published the proposal -- which we think accelerated this result.

That's what your funding goes for -- and it affects the lives of people who you and I will never meet. This is how our results show up in the world. The regional challenge now is to include Israel and Palestine into this electrical network. Newsweek wrote in 1993 -- Dreaming Up Peace Projects. The more these nations interconnect, the less likely they will fight.

In partnership for the planet,

Peter Meisen
President

p.s. Please feel free to send this report to anyone you know with Middle Eastern interests.

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