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Call for participation

Beirut neighborhood generators: We need your insights

Beirut neighborhood generators: We need your insights

Dear Reader,

For over 30 years, Lebanon has suffered from a seemingly chronic illness: Electricité du Liban, unable to meet demand far beyond its production capacity, provides its subscribers with only a few hours of power per day. Among the countless consequences of this failure, the obligation to stump up for an alternative power source, i.e. a private generator subscription, ranks high. Moreover, the associated costs of these subscriptions are increasingly difficult to bear in the context of Lebanon’s current social and monetary collapse.

However, while engaging with a private generator operator has been a part of our daily lives for decades and is, by default, indispensable if we wish to continue leading a semblance of a “normal” life, the operation of this sector remains worryingly opaque: Which actors control these generators? How do they share the market? Why have some agreed to install meters and others not? Are there significant differences in the prices charged by different operators and in different neighborhoods?

These are all legitimate questions, and doubtless many of you have been asking them for years. Answers, however, have been in short supply, largely due to the lack of sufficiently precise institutional data available to the public.

It is precisely to try to answer these questions that L'Orient Today and L'Orient-Le Jour have decided to launch a participatory project to collect — with your help, and while offering you total anonymity —, as much useful information on the owners of neighborhood generators in Beirut as we can. We voluntarily chose to limit this survey to the capital in order to limit the volume of inbound information and enable a more thorough and precise output during this pilot phase of the project.

Once dissected, the collected data will be made available to the public and will allow us, as we continue to report on the electricity crisis, to better analyze this sector in our articles.

The success of this project depends largely on you and the information we will collect and then cross-check. We therefore thank in advance those of you who live in Beirut for taking the 5 to 10 minutes necessary to participate in this survey, accessible by clicking here. The survey is available in three languages (more detailed instructions are laid out in the introduction section of the form).

If you do not live in Beirut or have a “building” generator, we would be grateful if you would distribute the link to this questionnaire to your friends and family, and/or share it on your social networks.

Together, we can shed light on the opaque sector powering our capital. 

Dear Reader,For over 30 years, Lebanon has suffered from a seemingly chronic illness: Electricité du Liban, unable to meet demand far beyond its production capacity, provides its subscribers with only a few hours of power per day. Among the countless consequences of this failure, the obligation to stump up for an alternative power source, i.e. a private generator subscription, ranks high....