Lebanon is in the dark: the Land of the Cedars is plunged into a total blackout. The electricity grid was completely shut down after the country’s two main plants, Al-Zahrani and Deir Ammar, ran out of fuel. According to government sources cited from the Reuters news agency the blackout could last for a few days. Without the Al Zahrani and Deir Amar plants, national energy production decreased by 200 megawatts. The Lebanese state electric company (Electricité du Liban – Edl) is conducting some maneuvers to manually rebuild the electricity grid, in the absence of the national control center that was destroyed during the explosion of the port of Beirut on 4 August 2020.
Beirut in the dark
The country had recently been the victim of a total blackout during Parliament’s vote of confidence in the new government led by Prime Minister Najib Miqati. For a few minutes, the electricity supplied by current generators left the hall of the Unesco theater in the dark, where parliament has been meeting for months on a provisional basis to protect the integrity of the deputies endangered by persistent popular protests near the historic and central seat of the hemicycle of Place de l’Etoile. Economic collapse Lebanon has been experiencing a prolonged shortage of essential services including fuel and electricity for months.
Lebanon, currently struggling with one of the worst economic crises in modern history, has been plagued by fuel shortages in recent months. Citizens rely on private generators for electricity. Edl, he wrote in recent days, Reuters can generate less than 500 megawatts from fuel oil that it has secured through an agreement with Iraq. The reserves reached a critical point last September and were already depleted in some plants at the time. The network suffered seven total blackouts last month. Iraq signed an agreement in July that allows the cash-strapped Lebanese government to pay 1 million tons of heavy fuel oil a year in goods and services.
