✽
I recently returned to Lebanon, where I have been doing ethnographic research for more than a decade, after an absence of several years. In the intervening years, the pandemic emerged, the country’s economy collapsed, and Lebanese united in the streets to call for the removal of the government and reform of the sectarian and corrupt political system.
The landscape I knew so well showed signs of the turmoil. With tourism in dramatic decline, hotels were shuttered. Downtown Beirut, site of the October 2019 protests against the government, was emptied of people and full of boarded-up windows and walls emblazoned with graffiti. When I checked into my Airbnb rental in the upscale Achrafieh neighborhood, the apartment’s owner explained that one of the expansive windows that lined the main living space had not shut properly since its repair following the August 2020 Beirut port explosion three miles away. He picked up a small chunk of glass from the window’s frame and handed it to me. “Here,” he said wryly, “this is your souvenir from the explosion.”
This seventh floor window wall provided a panoramic view of a lively Beirut neighborhood filled with other apartment buildings and high-rises. But at night, the sight of these buildings had a chilling effect: They were all dark.
In recent years, amid soaring inflation, unemployment, and poverty rates, Lebanese have faced devastating electricity shortages. But as I settled in, I began to notice something I’d never seen before in the city: Solar panels were popping up everywhere. From the rooftops and verandas of residential buildings to commercial establishments, people were now sourcing their own power to light up their homes and businesses.
What had led to this solar boom?
✽
In the 1990s, the Lebanese government began borrowing from internal and external sources to finance reconstruction after the country’s devastating 15-year civil war (1975–1990). Today Lebanon’s national debt has become massive, at US$85 billion—nearly half of which has been spent on the electricity sector.
Over the years, political actors with vested interests across the fossil fuel–dependent electricity supply chain have paid large subsidies to the state-run electricity company, Electricité du Liban (EDL), using Lebanese depositors’ money. These corrupt actions contributed to the collapse of the lira, the nation’s currency, which has lost 90 percent of its value in the past three years. U.S. sanctions on Syria have further exacerbated the problem by making it difficult to import energy resources from other nearby countries, such as Egypt and Jordan.
Now teetering on bankruptcy, the government has found that it can no longer afford to import or subsidize fuel. While EDL has suffered from supply shortages for decades, in October 2021, the country’s power plants ran out of diesel fuel completely and caused a nationwide blackout. For over a year now the company has only been providing …….