Saturday's blackout lasted eight hours, an EDL spokesperson said. (Credit: João Sousa/L’Orient Today)
BEIRUT — A general blackout occurred Saturday across Lebanon, the state power provider Electricité du Liban announced in a statement Sunday, adding that the electricity grid is at risk of failing any time now due to poor infrastructure and shortages of fuel needed to run the country’s power plants.
Here is what we know:
• A spokesperson from EDL told L’Orient Today that the company was able to re-establish power after eight hours of blackout through bringing two additional power plants online. However, the spokesperson noted that the state power provider does “not presently have sufficient fuel to keep the grid operating for the long term,” without providing a timeline for how many days the present fuel stock would last.
• Saturday’s total power outage occurred after two floating power plants leased from Karpowership, a subsidiary of Turkish operator Karadeniz Holding, stopped providing electricity the previous day. On Friday, Karpowership announced that the power barges, which had been supplying a quarter of Lebanon’s power production, had gone offline because their contract had expired.
• Further reducing EDL’s power production capacity, the Zouk power station has also ceased to produce electricity after having exhausted its stocks of category A fuel, the state provider announced in its statement Sunday. “This caused the total production to drop below the 500MW threshold, prompting the company to activate the Zahrani and Deir Ammar plants at full capacity, for a short period, in order to increase total production ... as much as possible, but fuel stocks quickly diminished,” EDL’s statement explained.
• For months now, EDL has not succeeded in providing much more than a couple of hours of power daily to most regions of the country. In late September, EDL had warned of the risk of a total blackout in October.
• Since the end of the Lebanese Civil War in 1990, public electricity has cost the country’s treasury billions of dollars each year, further worsening the public debt.
• The country, which has been grappling with an economic crisis since 2019, no longer has sufficient liquidity to obtain fuel necessary for the operation of its power plants. In addition, private generators — which are used to bridge gaps in the state power supply — struggle to stay online amid diesel shortages across the country.
• Lebanon and Iraq had previously closed a deal that involved getting 1 million tons of high-sulfur fuel oil from Iraq over the next year, then swapping it with fuel compatible with Lebanon’s plants. Lebanon received a first shipment, carrying 31,000 tons of fuel, under this deal at the end of September, but experts at the time said it would be weeks before an improvement became apparent in the state power supply.