Mr. Wahid did not say how much the plant between Karbala and Najaf would cost, but at standard international prices a plant of the scale he described would be worth roughly $200 million to $300 million.

Image A worker at a power plant in Baghdad on Wednesday. Baghdad and the rest of Iraq still suffer from shortages of electricity. Credit... Michael Kamber for The New York Times

The outlines of all three agreements were confirmed by Thamir Ghadban, an expert on energy who is also director of the committee of advisers to Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. But Mr. Ghadban said that the granting of the huge projects to rivals of the United States was not an indication that American companies were being excluded from consideration now that Iraqi oil revenues, which provide the basis for the Iraqi government’s budget, are largely paying for the reconstruction of the grid.

“There is no preference to the Iranians,” Mr. Ghadban said, citing the most obvious potential point of sensitivity for the United States. “There is no opposition or stance from the Iraqi government to bar American or Western companies. It is the other way around,” Mr. Ghadban said, indicating that he urged American contractors to bid for work in Iraq.

Of the two new projects Iraq has agreed to finance, Mr. Wahid said, the largest is a $940 million power plant in Wasit to be built by a Chinese company, which he said was named Shanghai Heavy Industry. That project would pump some 1,300 megawatts of electricity into the Iraqi grid. For comparison, all of the plants currently connected to Iraq’s grid produce a total of roughly 5,000 megawatts.

He said that Iraq had already spent $12 million leveling the ground in preparation for the Chinese plant. The Sadr City project, which will include a small refinery, will cost $150 million and be built by an Iranian company, Sunir, Mr. Wahid said. That plant is expected to produce about 160 megawatts of electricity.

The Iraqi Electricity Ministry, which Mr. Wahid heads, is one of the few in the central government that has received praise for successfully spending much of the money allocated to it in the Iraqi budget for reconstruction projects. Because of security problems, a shortage of officials who are skilled at writing and executing contracts, and endemic corruption, many of the ministries have either left their rebuilding money unspent or poured it into projects that have had a marginal impact on the quality of life for Iraqi citizens.