Lebanon was in a complete blackout after the two main power stations went offline on Saturday, the state electricity corporation, Electricite du Liban (EDL), said.
The Mediterranean country is battling one of the planet’s worst Economic Crisis Since the 1850s, and in recent months, it has struggled to import enough fuel oil for its power plants.
State electricity is barely available for an hour in most places amid power cuts, while the fuel needed to power private back-up generators is also in short supply.
“After being forced to shut down power generation tomorrow morning (Friday) to the late Ammar power station” [to] While its gas oil reserves are depleting, the Zahrani plant also closed this afternoon for the same reason, EDL said in a statement.
“This caused a complete collapse of the network and there is no possibility of it being restored at the moment”, it said.
This was the second such complete outage reported by EDL since the beginning of the month, after a similar incident last Saturday.
A power ministry source told AFP All this was being done “to find a way out of the problem and ensure fuel”.
EDL said a fuel oil shipment was expected to arrive on Saturday evening, and was expected to unload early next week.
Restoring power is one of many difficult tasks facing Lebanon’s new government, formed last month after 13 months of political wrangling.
Several measures have been introduced in a desperate bid to keep the lights on.
Lebanon has reached an agreement to bring Jordan’s electricity and Egyptian gas into the country through war-torn Syria, while the Shia movement Hezbollah has begun distributing hydrocarbons separately from Iran.
The kingdom is also bringing some oil fuel to power stations in exchange for medical services under a swap deal with Iraq.