So there I was sitting on a Lebanese friend's terrace on Friday night when the conversation turns to the subject of solar energy, something we Lebanese should really be embracing for a million reasons – well three obvious reasons really: it's clean; it's cheap and it's efficient – in a land that boasts over 320 days of sunshine.
But we are woefully inefficient and wildly corrupt. Readers familiar with day-to-day life in Lebanon will also know that a quarter of a century after the civil war ended, there is nowhere in the country that enjoys 24-hour electricity and in some rural areas the ration is as little as eight hours a day.
My host makes up for her shortfall in government electricity by cranking up a massive Chinese diesel generator. But on this particular evening, the local power station clearly couldn’t decide if it was giving us power or not and so we kept alternating between light and darkness with the generator unable to decide what to do.
One of the guests then revealed with a certain smugness that he was using a cleaner, more efficient and vastly cheaper power solution that involved nothing more than sticking a few solar panels on the roof of his garage.
These charged a couple of hefty batteries neatly housed in a purpose-built compartment with enough power to run his home during a power cut, all for the princely sum of roughly US$10,000, which he was paying over 10 years at zero interest, courtesy of a programme initiated by the central bank in partnership with Electricité du Liban, the national power company.
This was surely too good to be true; but according to an excellent report in Executive magazine from December 2015, $450 million had at the time been invested in renewable energy since 2009, with a tenfold increase in the number of companies providing solar power over the same period. It gets better. There is even a Lebanese Center for Energy Conservation, part of the ministry of energy and water, which was formed back in the boom days of 2009. The LCEC in turn created the National Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Action Plan, which between 2012 and 2015, financed, with the help of the central bank loans, more than $350m worth of sustainable energy projects. Last year, about 20 megawatts of solar power was installed across the country, and by the end of this year that number is expected to treble.
At $10,000 a pop for an average domestic installation, it works out at less than $100 a month per household. Before I moved back to the UK, I was paying about $200 a month to a private electricity supplier to supplement the state’s shortfall and this was in Beirut, which gets between 18 and 20 hours of power a day. In the mountains it’s a different story. Like my host, I also use a noisy 5 kVA Chinese generator that runs on diesel and which would probably be banned in most countries. In all, my generator costs me more than $300 a month.
So quite why the state is still trying to play catch-up and build more outdated power stations to satisfy Lebanon’s growing demand for power is anyone’s guess.
Municipality-led solar power initiatives must surely be the way forward – so why is the whole country not going bonkers over the idea? Why are we not seeing the offer advertised on TV and on the gazillions of billboards that have become a national eyesore?
Could it be that the government is keeping it low-key so as to not anger the so-called electricity mafia, the grey market that the former energy minister Elie Hobeika tried to shut down in the ‘90s, but which has come back as a powerful lobby, one that makes an estimated $150 million from selling unregulated electricity, delivered more often than not with dodgy equipment and equally cowboy methods.
Well, I have a name and a phone number. What do I have to lose?
Michael Karam is a freelance writer who lives between Beirut and Brighton.
business@thenational.ae
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