Lebanon's Electricity Labyrinth and Its Self-Perpetuating Crises
Some may find talk of the need for Lebanon to transition to clean and renewable energy superfluous at a time when the government is unable to secure regular supplies of the fuel oil shipments needed to operate thermal power plants. Yet the current fiscal deficit and administrative disarray do not justify the government's lack of preparedness for a gradual transition to renewable energy. Addressing the electricity crisis requires examining options for deploying suitable clean and renewable energy sources to meet domestic electricity consumption needs.
Despite efforts made to build new thermal power plants and rehabilitate distribution networks during the reconstruction phase of the last decade of the 20th century, those efforts failed to meet the growing electricity needs of the Lebanese people. The same applies to the fate of the "National Plan for the Sustainable Recovery of the Electricity Sector," approved by the caretaker government in March 2022, owing to the failure to ensure regular and sustainable generation.
Conversely, the private sector was not permitted to generate electricity until the enactment of Law 48/2017, which regulates public-private partnerships, while licenses granted under this law since 2017 to generate electricity from wind power have remained dead letters. Meanwhile, private generators had managed, as a fait accompli, to end the monopoly of Électricité du Liban over power generation that had lasted until the early 1990s, after the Lebanese state proved unable to keep pace with rising demand for electricity.
The fact that the rehabilitation of the electricity sector, both its grid and its plants, coincided with the deliberate neglect of hydroelectric plants, which had supplied Lebanon with 70% of its electricity consumption until 1976, following the civil war, demonstrates that those in charge of the energy sector lacked an integrated vision for expanding and developing it. This caused the majority of those plants to cease operating and deprived Lebanon of the savings that could have been achieved in production costs.
Keeping the price per kilowatt-hour below the cost of production encouraged wasteful consumption and left consumers uninterested in finding alternative sources of electricity beyond those provided by the state. This inflicted heavy, direct losses on Électricité du Liban, which had to be offset through treasury advances to keep generation going, contributing, hand in hand with rampant administrative corruption, to the accumulation and ballooning of the public debt.
The drop in Lebanon's electricity demand to 1,700 megawatt-hours coincided with the worsening financial and economic crisis, down from nearly 3,200 megawatts according to Électricité du Liban estimates at the end of 2019. This decline stems, on the one hand, from the Lebanese people resorting to cutting back their consumption, and, on the other, from growing interest among individuals and institutions in shifting to clean and renewable energy, particularly solar power systems, whose total capacity reached 1,500 megawatts by the end of last June.
While hopes had been pinned on the "Distributed Renewable Energy Law," No. 318/2023, to encourage investment in renewable energy, legal obstacles preventing its implementation quickly emerged, specifically the failure to establish the Electricity Regulatory Authority mandated by Electricity Sector Regulation Law 462/2002. That authority holds the exclusive right to grant licenses, a hurdle that also stalled the offer by TotalEnergies and QatarEnergy to build a 100-megawatt solar power plant.
Remarkably, the Qatari offer to build three solar power plants did not receive the required response from the government, at a time when Lebanon is unable to meet its needs for energy and other essentials. Those in charge of the energy sector did not stop at rejecting the initial offer, which was later scaled back to a single 100-megawatt plant that met the same fate as its predecessor. If this failure to engage with the Qatari offer proves anything, it is that the problem lies in the mindset governing Lebanon's energy sector rather than in a lack of necessary resources or a shortage of funding.
By contrast, the Chinese grant to supply the Ogero authority with solar power systems to provide electricity to the authority's exchanges and reduce reliance on generators, scheduled to be delivered before the beginning of this coming September, raises hopes that Lebanon might secure similar grants to build solar power plants.
Notably, Lebanon's pledge to increase its use of clean and renewable energy to 30% by 2030 was conditional on receiving international support to achieve half of that increase. Had the Lebanese government honored its commitments, Lebanon would have acquired renewable energy systems before its financial and economic crisis erupted, and might even have been able to avert it altogether. Yet continuing to handle worsening crises, above all the electricity crisis, with the same old methods makes hope for solutions in the foreseeable future closer to a dream than to reality.
Moreover, the renewable energy sources from which Lebanon could benefit are not limited to solar power, but also include processing waste, of which Lebanon generates no less than 1.381 million metric tons annually, representing untapped raw materials and a source of renewable fuel. Instead, this waste is being buried in landfills that can no longer accommodate more of it, despite the hazards landfilling poses to the environment and public safety. Refusing to treat this waste and harness it to generate electricity increases financial burdens and the public debt while allowing the environmental carnage and its health repercussions to continue.
By comparison, waste-to-energy plants in Europe generated nearly 40 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity and 90 billion kilowatt-hours of heat in 2018, supplying 18 million people with electricity and providing heating for another 15.2 million. Meanwhile, the Tripoli landfill, the Bourj Hammoud and Costa Brava landfills, and others threaten an environmental catastrophe, yet no efforts are being made to treat their waste and harness emissions from these landfills to supply electricity to surrounding areas, along the lines of the Naameh landfill generators, a step that would help reduce the fuel oil bill that the government cannot afford to pay.
Even before treating waste to generate electricity, the government should have rehabilitated the idle hydroelectric power plants, since maintenance remains less costly than building new stations. Put differently, if plans must be drawn up to address the "sustainable crisis" in electricity generation, there is no solution without adopting clean and renewable energy as a primary source of electric power alongside existing sources, especially given that the cost of generating electricity from renewable energy averages roughly 40% less than power generated from fossil fuels.
With the power generation crisis having flared up anew in less than a month, and amid the haphazard plans plaguing the electricity sector, the mindset governing this sector must change, and indeed it might be more worthwhile to replace those in charge of it. Global trends and technological advances in this sector must be taken into account, even as political factions remain preoccupied with their own feuds amid the ongoing presidential vacuum and escalating Israeli aggression on the one hand, and administrative and political corruption obstructing solutions on the other.
Translated from Arabic with AI. Read it in Arabic