A solar revolution driven by power cuts

About 2,300 ft. above Beirut in the Matn district mountains, Roger Mazloum and his brother Elias greet me on an unusually balmy winter day as they chop wood to help keep their early 20th-century home warm before the cold returns.

- By Adam Rasmi

I'm no match for these burlier Lebanese men, who grew up in Broummana, a town about a dozen miles east of the Lebanese capital, but I take my turn, meekly swinging an ax at the tree stump before us. After a lackluster start, and plenty of patience from the pair, something akin to firewood begins to splinter off.

Roger takes me through the family home's front door-past a living room with traditional Lebanese floor tiles and artwork dedicated to Umm Kulthum, the Egyptian titan of Arabic music-and up the stairs to the roof. The pine-covered mountains and the Mediterranean Sea are a pleasant distraction, but the real purpose of the tour is to see the 18 solar panels slightly obscuring the vista. Like tens of thousands of Lebanese people, the Mazloums have turned to solar power to generate reliable and cost-effective electricity in a crisis-stricken state that provides as little as one hour of power a day.

"In the past, even when the situation was normal, we used to have five, six, seven hours of power cuts a day," says Roger, as the three of us sip Arabic coffee on their balcony. He is referring to the period before an economic crisis began in 2019 that has seen the Lebanese lira lose more than 98% of its value against the U.S. dollar.

The state-run Electricité du Liban (EDL) has a generation capacity of around 1,800 megawatts, according to Pierre Khoury, director of the Lebanese Center for Energy Conservation (LCEC), compared with the 2,000 to 3,000 MW the country needed before the crisis. But EDL provides only around 250 MW today, because the government struggles to pay for the imported fuel used to power the country's main electricity plants.