Lack of fuel forces Lebanon's last major power plant to shut down

FlyingSquid , 1 hour ago

Lebanon is surrounded by oil-rich countries but can’t secure enough oil for its oil-based power plants. Amazing.

DrQuickbeam , 39 minutes ago

Lebanon is a beautiful country and Beirut is a fun city, but man their government bungled things for so long that everything is falling apart and all the money is leaving the country.

tal , 1 hour ago

The majority of citizens have over the years been bridging the regular outages of electricity by relying on diesel generators. Since the massive economic crisis began in 2019, the electricity crisis has also worsened.

Was this due to that explosion in Beiruit?

hits Wikipedia

No, that was apparently in 2020, when this was already underway:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Beirut_explosion

If it’s that borked, unless theft or similar is an issue, I’d think that individuals that can afford to would be rolling out solar capacity. Solar’s got reliability issues too, but even if you have no buffering capability, lose power at night or and on some days, it’s cheaper than constantly running small diesel generators, which is not cheap to do on a regular basis.

kagis

It sounds like some people are doing that:

Why Lebanon Is Having a Surprising Solar Power Boom

“In the past, even when the situation was normal, we used to have five, six, seven hours of power cuts a day,” Roger says, as the three of us sip Arabic coffee on their balcony. He is referring to the period before an economic crisis began in 2019 that has seen the Lebanese lira lose more than 98% of its value against the U.S. dollar.

The state-run Electricité du Liban (EDL) has a generation capacity of around 1,800 megawatts, according to Pierre Khoury, the director of the government-affiliated Lebanese Center for Energy Conservation (LCEC), compared with the estimated 2,000 to 3,000 megawatts the country needed before the crisis. But EDL provides only around 200 to 250 megawatts today, because the economic collapse means the government struggles to pay for the imported fuel used to power the country’s two main electricity plants.

I lean over while Elias, a civil engineer by training, pulls out his Android phone. As the TBB Nova app he uses to manage the Mazloums’ solar-power system shows, the 18 panels are generating over one kilowatt per hour, enough to power a large home where several generations of Mazloums live. He says that the solar panels and battery system, which were installed in July 2020, are saving the family between $3,000 and $4,000 a year in electricity and generator bills. (They spent over $10,000 to install them.) “But the main thing is reliability,” Elias says. “For the last two years, we basically didn’t have power cuts… Even in the really difficult times we were still up and running.”

“But we started with solar energy sooner than expected, because of the lack of electricity in Lebanon,” she says. “Actually, both the lack of electricity and the fuel problems in Lebanon. Sometimes we are short of fuel. We are also paying a lot for fuel.”

An hour’s drive south of Toula, a branch of Spinneys supermarket is also installing panels in the parking lot and rooftop to slash its generator bills.

“I think we will save around half of our energy costs in Jbeil due to solar panels,” said Hassan Ezzeldine, chairperson of Gray Mackenzie Retail Lebanon, which owns Spinneys.

The company spends between $800,000 and $1.4 million a month on electricity for its chain of supermarkets, he said, to power generators that run on diesel round-the-clock.

“The cost of generators today is dramatic. It’s a disaster.”

His company has considered turning to solar energy for years, but after the crisis “we thought … it’s something we needed to do, and we needed to do it immediately,” he said.

MediaBiasFactChecker Bot , 1 hour ago

The news source of this post could not be identified. Please check the source yourself. Media Bias Fact Check | bot support