Egypt woke up to power cuts last Thursday on an almost unprecedented scale, with governorates across the country suffering blackouts as a result of what the government said was a failure of the electrical grid. Even essential services were hit, including the Cairo Metro. From Cairo to Aswan and Sinai to Marsa Matrouh, power cuts lasted for hours, shutting down water pumps and leaving villages and cities, including large parts of Cairo, with neither water nor electricity. “We were trying to repair the electricity grid, but this led to its being put under extra pressure, leading to failure,” Minister of Electricity Mohamed Shaker said on television. He denied that there had been a terrorist attack on the grid. It was only a “technical error,” he said. The minister apologised and said that those responsible would be held accountable. He also vowed that all efforts would be made to reduce the problems by the end of the week, a promise that was largely kept. “We lost close to one fourth of our electricity production, and it was impossible to restore quickly as the grid is already under-maintained. This is not to mention that total electricity production is already one third beneath the country's needs,” said a source at the Ministry of Electricity. He said the cuts had been “more or less inevitable. The electricity grid is so worn out and overloaded that cuts on this scale could happen again.” Egypt's total electricity production is around 30,000 megawatts. What is really needed to cover the parts of the country that have access to electricity — given that many villages have no electricity at all — is 40,000 to 50,000 megawatts; in other words, considerably more. The problems have been compounded by the fact that even the 30,000-megawatt figure is not sustainable, either because the grid cannot bear it or because of fossil fuel shortages.
When it started: For the last few years Egypt has experienced recurrent power cuts. But the problem first became apparent during to the war with Israel in 1967, and parts of the country were under Israeli occupation. During the first decade of his rule, former president Hosni Mubarak managed to contain the problem by carrying out extensive upgrades to the country's infrastructure. However, during the last few years of his three-decade rule, when Mubarak was less involved in running state affairs, the electricity cuts resumed. “It happened during the last two to three years of his rule. The failures were the result of the confused administration and planning towards the end of Mubarak's rule, and the leadership of the ministry was also not as clear as it should have been,” said the same ministry source. Maher Abaza was the minister of electricity for the first two decades of Mubarak's rule. He was known as a hands-on minister who had the confidence of the president. This allowed him to draw up forward-looking policies that expanded electricity production to meet rising levels of consumption. “Towards the end of his rule, Mubarak was not really in charge, and his son used to intervene a lot, especially in energy related matters,” the source said. “This caused confusion in the management of energy resources and inevitably influenced electricity production. It was not very visible then, but in hindsight it can't be missed.” Mohamed Al-Sobeki is a professor at Cairo University's Faculty of Engineering. He is also the former head of the Centre for Energy Research. Al-Sobeki says that the problems the country is suffering today “are largely the result of failures in planning.” He continued, “Not enough was done to meet expanding needs, especially of families looking for higher living standards. This means higher electricity consumption, but it also means the expansion of industrial and business activities.” In general, according to Al-Sobeki, there has been poor management of the country's natural resources, especially natural gas, which could have been used better for electricity production. “I am not saying that we are out of resources,” he said. “We still have sufficient resources, but they are largely unexplored, and doing so will take time and money, neither of which we have much of.” According to sources in the energy industry, Egypt's export of natural gas, at low rates, to countries like Israel and Spain is considered one of the worst policies undertaken during Mubarak's later years. Egypt is now finding it difficult to persuade large oil companies to continue the search for new oil and gas fields. This is in part due to the large debts that the government has run up with the oil companies. In order to resolve this problem, it was decided last week to take out a loan from the state banks to pay off most of these debts, something which it is hoped will persuade the companies concerned to restart their operations. “Several contracts are being negotiated and exploration projects being considered, but even if these succeed it will take several years before the electricity plants can be run with new supplies of fossil fuel,” Al-Sobeki said. Engineer Akram Ismail added, “It was a mistake from the beginning for Egypt to expand the volume of electricity production using gas-supplied power plants.” These plants, together with the Aswan High Dam, provide the country with over 80 per cent of its electricity needs. Today, the country is finding it increasingly difficult to secure the fuel needed for the electricity generating stations, despite the considerable, but not unconditional, support that both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have shown towards Egypt since the ousting of Muslim Brotherhood president Mohamed Morsi one year ago. There are also concerns that the High Dam may not be able to produce the same level of electricity over the long term, in view of the potential drop in Egypt's water share that could be on the horizon as a result of Ethiopia's building of its Renaissance Dam on the Nile. Meanwhile, as official and unofficial sources agree, Egypt has not gone far enough in embracing other forms of energy production.
Living with the cuts: “We are getting used to living in the dark for many hours every day,” said Mona Hussein, a housewife in Mohandessin, a middle-class district of Cairo. Like many others from the same socio-economic background, Hussein was convinced that the electricity cuts experienced during the one-year rule of former president Mohamed Morsi would disappear once he was removed from power. She thought that the cuts were due to “attacks on the electricity grid after the 25 January Revolution.” When the cuts increased under Morsi's rule, Hussein went along with claims made by the predominantly anti-Morsi media that under Muslim Brotherhood rule the country was wasting fossil fuel and even exporting it abroad. However, a year after Morsi's removal, Hussein is no longer quite so sure who she should blame for the worsening state of the electricity services. She had hoped that President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi would solve the electricity problems, and now she's disappointed. Last year, her family bought several emergency electricity generators. When Al-Sisi was elected president, the generators were sold because he family thought they wouldn't be needed anymore. Last month, the family was forced to spend LE3,500 on a larger generator, so bad had the cuts become. “We thought about getting a solar-powered system, but we decided against the idea because it is not safe to keep large solar generators in the house and we would have had difficulties with the neighbours,” Hussein said. It might not have been wise to depend on solar energy either, she added. Over the last few months, Hussein has heard various explanations for the on-going problems. Some have said that they are the result of attacks by Muslim Brotherhood members on power plants, while others have said they are the result of severe shortages of fuel. According to Ismail, it would be wrong to blame the current problems on a few isolated attacks. “I am not saying that the attacks do not happen, but these attacks cannot be responsible for more than two to five per cent of the overall shortage of power. Most of it has to do with the lack of fossil fuel and problems with the grid itself, not to mention the already existing problem with diminishing supply and increasing demand,” he said. The minister of electricity himself has repeatedly denied that the problems are due to sabotage by Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated engineers working in power plants. There have been no cases of this happening, and the minister has told various television talk shows that engineers found to have connections to the Brotherhood have been removed from their posts. Out of the darkness: “We should stop looking for excuses. The problem has been brewing for decades, and it is not just the result of a few years of bad energy planning and administration,” said a leading name in private-sector industry. He said that poorly devised, unsustainable government policy was allowed to continue for years because officials did not want to “rock the boat.” Because of this, state energy policy was not reformed. “For years, the state has been over-subsidising energy and electricity. This has led to enormous losses, reaching the point where the system just cannot keep on going,” he said. According to this expert, the first step on the long path towards reform will be for the state to further reduce energy subsidies. The prices of domestic gas and automobile fuel rose by more than 30 per cent following the recent removal of some subsidies. Further increases will have to come soon, he said, “maybe in January next year or a little later, depending on when the elections take place.” The government has to realise it is no longer capable of being the sole provider of energy, he added. “The time has come for the government to realise that there is not just room, but in fact there is a need, for the private sector to step in to help,” he said. Ismail agreed that state provision is now out of fashion, and sooner or later the private sector could be invited to build and run power plants in Egypt. While the source at the Ministry of Electricity fears that this would mean large price rises, Ismail says that there could be ways around rising prices. “The state could allow the private sector to generate electricity and then buy this electricity and feed it into the grid,” he said. “Of course, this would require a lot of technical work, and this would also take time.” Other options, according to Al-Sobeki, include diversifying energy resources. “We could opt now for wind- and solar-generated electricity. Some of the technology used is expensive, but much of it is less so, and in the long term renewable energy is a good part of the solution for a country like Egypt that has a lot of wind and sun,” he said. It might not be possible for the entire grid to run off renewable energy, “but we certainly need to diversify,” he said. Ismail was also willing to see the integration of coal-generated electricity into the various technologies on offer. “I know it is unpopular but building coal-powered plants could be one of the short-term answers, because these are cheaper to build and operate than solar,” he said. ARGUMENTS FOR COAL: The argument over the use of coal in energy generation took a toll on the career of former minister of environment Laila Iskandar, now minister for urban planning. Last year, Iskandar objected to a plan to import coal to operate factories, especially those producing cement and fertilisers, on the grounds of pollution. The rest of the government ignored her objections. The debate prompted the formation of Egyptians Against Coal, a pressure group that aims to raise awareness of the environmental cost of using coal used to produce energy. Ahmed Al-Deroubi, a member of the group, said that the use of coal would lead to soaring health bills and higher rates of respiratory illness. “We have to worry about the cost of the environmentally friendly systems that will be needed if coal is used,” he said. “If you build power plants using coal you introduce a system that can only be used for perhaps 50 years before it needs to be phased out.” But he added, “You have to make choices based on what you can afford. Factories have been denied the use of gas, and you cannot ask them simply to wait for the construction of solar power plants.” Equally controversial have been plans to use nuclear energy. During the last year of his rule Mubarak promised to build a nuclear power plant in Egypt, reawakening a project explored in the 1960s when former president Gamal Abdel-Nasser sent engineers to the former Soviet Union with this in mind. The project was shelved in 1967. In the 1980s, Mubarak talked of restarting the nuclear project, but was dissuaded by the Chernobyl disaster. It was only when it was realised that new sources of energy would need to be found that the scheme was reconsidered. President Al-Sisi has said that he is willing to reconsider the use of nuclear power, despite warnings that the country may not have the necessary technical skills. He has asked Prime Minister Ibrahim Mehlab to draw up a new four-year plan for the country's electricity needs. During his presidential campaign, Al-Sisi said that he intended to provide “prompt answers” to the electricity problem, a main factor in the widespread anger against Morsi's rule. At a meeting with the editors of Egypt's national newspapers Al-Sisi acknowledged the level of frustration felt by the public on the issue and said he was doing his utmost to solve the problem. According to Ismail, whatever solutions are eventually found, consumers will have to be persuaded to reduce their consumption. “We need to change our habits as individuals. We need to charge more for higher consumption and give people incentives to cut down,” he said. Al-Sobeki said other countries, among them Japan, have implemented policies that Egypt could learn from. In recent months, radio and TV stations have been broadcasting an awareness-raising campaign aimed at persuading people to lower their use of electricity. The hope is that solutions can be found that will prevent a recurrence of last Thursday's massive power outages, during which essential facilities — including the Cairo underground and radio and TV stations — were left without power. The problem, a source at the Ministry of Electricity said, will be significantly reduced in the coming few weeks with the arrival of more fuel from the United Arab Emirates and the expected drop in consumption in the cooler autumn months. However, he said that even this encouraging news might not lead to life without power cuts.
