Libya's Blackouts Drag Into August Despite $1 Billion in Monthly Fuel Imports

$1 billion a month. That is what Libya is spending to import fuel while its lights go out, its pumps stall and its petrol stations fill with queues. The figure comes not from the National Oil Corporation but from the United Nations envoy for Libya, Hanna Tetteh, who told the Security Council the country was spending that sum every month despite an ongoing electricity crisis and shortages ³. In a country sitting on abundant oil and gas, the number lands as both an expense and an indictment.

Tetteh's diagnosis was institutional, not technical. She briefed the Council that widespread outages had “exposed problems linked to institutional fragmentation, weak investment, poor coordination of decisions, and resource mismanagement” ³. The UN has separately warned of fuel diversion and infrastructure strain deepening the power crisis ². The point is blunt: electrons are not the only thing leaking from the system.

Demand alone shows how far supply has fallen behind. Abdelbasit Al-Jabou, director general for oversight of the energy sector and public companies at the Audit Bureau, said electricity demand reaches 10,000 MW, with some areas facing up to 12 hours of darkness while others have only two hours ⁹. That gap — 12 hours in one neighbourhood, two in another — is why fairness has become as political as generation. Libya endured what one account called “a chaotic summer of persistent and lengthy power cuts and several blackouts resulting in violent demonstrations and barricades, petrol and diesel shortages” ¹¹.

The grid's fragility was laid bare by a triple failure. The state electricity company, GECOL, began gradual restoration after three blackouts in two days affecting an area from Sirte to the Tunisian border and all of southern Libya ⁶. Rebuilding the grid is gradual and power cannot be restored instantly, the company said ⁶. The report published on 17 August describes the restoration as under way after the triple blackout, but the sources do not give the exact blackout dates.

When the grid fails in Libya, water often fails with it, because pumps and plants stall without power. The human register of that double loss appeared far from ministerial meeting rooms, at a popular Tripoli seafood restaurant called Al Robyan ⁵. It offered a table of seafood in exchange for “some fuel for the generator,” posting “We've run out of earthly solutions” ⁵. The post drew thousands of responses ⁵. It was a joke, a barter offer and a status report at once.

Part of August's collapse can be traced to Zawiya on the western coast, home to a refinery and critical network nodes. A drone strike ignited a gasoline-storage tank at the refinery on Monday 10 August, with firefighters battling the blaze on Tuesday 11 August ⁸. Then on Wednesday 12 August, a one-way explosive drone destroyed an electricity substation near Zawiya, cutting power to wide areas south of the city ⁷. The report described it as the sixth drone strike, though its truncated text does not specify the sixth of what period precisely ⁷.

The political response moved in the third week of August. On 19 August, Prime Minister Abdel Hamid Aldabaiba met NOC Chairman Masoud Suleiman to discuss the electricity and fuel situation and “urgent measures being taken to address current bottlenecks” ⁴. On 21 August, Aldabaiba instructed GECOL to implement load shedding fairly, and the Libyan Iron and Steel Company, LISCO, was ordered to stop production and connect its power generation to the national grid ¹¹. The message was that scarce power would at least be shared, and that big industrial users would yield to households.

On fuel, the state oil company tried to calm the streets. NOC said production had resumed at Zawiya facilities after de-escalation and that citizens need not queue ¹⁰. Citizens queued anyway. Petrol queues formed across the country for around 10 days despite NOC assurances that production had resumed at Zawiya ¹⁰. By late August, the same sources that carried the assurance were carrying images of lines, a measure of how little official words now move behaviour when tanks are empty.