Zouk Mosbeh power plant, north of Beirut. (Credit: Philippe Hage Boutros)
The official supplier Electricité du Liban (EDL) announced in a statement on Thursday that it would be able to slightly improve power supply over the holiday period.
“A temporary and experimental measure has been put in place over the holidays, running additional generating units in the new inverter-equipped engine plant at the Zouk power plant,” the text says. These generators will need to be connected to the power grid, “so that the plant's current production capacity should reach around 75 megawatts by Jan. 2, 2025, following ongoing tests,” it adds. The plant, located on the Kesrouan coast and known for being outdated and particularly polluting, has been idle for several years.
According to EDL's press release, “this temporary measure will help increase daily supply hours from 6-8 hours [currently] to 7-9 hours per day during the period mentioned,” i.e. an extra hour on average per day.
The company assures that it will “keep citizens informed of any new developments concerning electricity supply through subsequent announcements on this subject.”
On Dec. 23, EDL announced that it would be able to supply six to eight hours of power a day over the festive season, two hours more than usual. The state-owned supplier said it was commissioning additional 200-megawatt generation units at the Zahrani power plant, south of Beirut. When contacted, a source in EDL's management told L'Orient-Le Jour that this increase was not linked to a rise in fuel supplies, but to the management's stock management strategy.
The next fuel shipment, of 60,000 tonnes, is expected between Christmas and New Year, according to the same source.
Deficient for years in terms of production capacity relative to demand and financially, EDL's situation deteriorated considerably with the multidimensional crisis that erupted in 2019. It began to slowly recover after the government approved an adjustment of its tariffs to market prices at the end of 2022, and the Energy Ministry launched a loss reduction and bill collection improvement strategy that enabled it to start rebalancing its accounts, which had previously been heavily dependent on Treasury advances granted by Parliament.
Its situation is still far from ideal, however, insofar as its only source of fuel supply comes from an agreement with Iraq, in place since the summer of 2021 and instituting a barter mechanism with deferred payment. The Iraqi and Lebanese governments recently gave the go-ahead for a further extension of this agreement until the end of January 2025, with an increase in the quantities supplied.
