The Syrian energy ministry on Tuesday attributed a nationwide blackout to a “technical malfunction in the electrical system.”
The lights went out on Tuesday evening, and by Wednesday morning power had been restored to only three provinces.
Khaled Aboudi, director general of the Public Corporation for Electricity Transmission and Distribution, said power was restored to Homs, Hama, and Tartous provinces, and would “gradually return to the remaining provinces.”
Power in Syria tends to be spotty at best, with perhaps three hours a day of reliable electricity in much of the country. The long and grueling civil war that began in 2011 damaged much of the country’s fragile power infrastructure.
Another problem is that Syria relied heavily upon imported Iranian oil during the fifty-year Assad dynasty, because much of its own production capacity was destroyed during the civil war. Prior to 2011, Syria was pumping up to 400,000 barrels per day of crude oil, enough to meet domestic needs with a modest surplus for export.
When dictator Bashar Assad was overthrown by jihadi insurgents in December, the supply of Iranian oil was cut off. Qatar began pumping natural gas through Jordan in March to meet some of Syria’s energy demand, but those imports are only good for generating about 400 megawatts of the estimated 6,500 megawatts needed by Syria every day.
The insurgent government in Damascus has pledged to restore Syria’s energy infrastructure and repair its power grid, but those efforts would cost more than $250 billion, and it will be difficult to raise such huge investments while sanctions imposed against the Assad regime remain in place.
International energy companies will be reluctant to invest in Syria as long as the free world has misgivings about the “interim government” that replaced Assad, and doubts about the ability of that government to provide a safe environment for industrial development.
Another plan for meeting the energy shortfall involves two electricity-generating barges acquired from Qatar and Turkey, which could generate several hundred megawatts of power between them. Aboudi, the Syrian government’s energy distribution director, announced the barge plan in January, but did not say when the ships would arrive.
