Electricity: Beyond the Infrastructure

The feeling a power cut triggers is a combination of anger, frustration, fear, and unfairness.

Oil painting by Lebanese artist Balsam Abo Zour, 2025. Title: تك الديجانتير

My co-author today, Florida-based Lebanese artist Balsam Abo Zour, and I were both born and raised in Lebanon amid paralyzing power outages that have always been accompanied by waves of curses against a dysfunctional government. We lived together in Beirut and remember the days when we had to postpone showering during the day due to a lack of hot water, and how disruptive power cuts were to the work we were separately doing.

Balsam was never afraid of a blackout. I hated it - being unable to see the light and having to briefly grope to find my way. The feeling a power cut triggers is a combination of anger, frustration, fear, and unfairness. No wonder why some refer to the electricity sector as the “Achilles heel” of some governments in our region.

Last week, as I logged off to start a brief holiday, I saw videos of darkness covering the Kurdistan region of Iraq following a rocket attack on the Khor Mor gas field, which knocked out the electricity grid. That was horrible news. Iraq Oil Report quoted Sirwan Mohammed, spokesperson for the Sulaymaniyah Directorate of Electricity, as saying that 80% of the Kurdish region’s electric supply relies on power plants that run on gas from Khor Mor.

The attack was on energy security, economic development, and human development—it’s as simple as that. And it wasn’t the first time armed groups have targeted energy infrastructure in the Kurdish region, including Khor Mor which has been producing more than 500 million standard cubic feet per day (scf/d) of gas.

I have covered power outages and similar attacks several times in the past, and the economic and political impact is usually the first thing we rush to cover. But one thing that cannot be ignored is the severe psychological strain on people. I wanted to capture that feeling in a different way for THE CHOKEPOINT, so I called Balsam and we discussed.

The painting you see at the top is her creation. The Arabic title تك الديجانتير is a well-known Lebanese expression ( built on the French loanword disjoncteur) used whenever there’s an electricity overload, and it means “the circuit breaker has tripped.” I love the work because it captures the amalgam I mention above: anger, frustration, fear, and unfairness. I can easily talk about numbers and data with you (and will do so below), but in my special corner here, THE CHOKEPOINT, I want my subjects to always maintain the feelings associated with them. And I’m extremely happy today to be sharing this post with an artist like Balsam.

Now, let’s move to the economic and financial strain of electricity shutdowns.

In addition to my home country, Lebanon, I lived and worked in Iraq ( Baghdad) for several years as an energy researcher and analyst. In both countries, I experienced and researched the fantastic failure of providing power services despite the availability of funds, data, and human brains to improve the infrastructure and the whole electrical supply chain.

When it comes to Iraq ,I remember an excellent interview conducted by Iraqi Voices podcast in July 2021 with Ali al-Saffar of the International Energy Agency (IEA) to discuss an electricity shutdown that month, and Ali provided important numbers based on an IEA team modeling that revealed the sheer economic and financial loss of electricity outages in the country. I jotted down some notes while listening to the episode in my apartment in Baghdad, and always refer to them when needed.

The question posed was: if Iraq had been able to meet its electricity demand during the summer months of the previous 5 or 6 years (from 2021), how much larger would the Iraqi economy be? The economic loss, based on the modeling, was around 140 trillion Iraqi dinars between 2014–2020. In other words, and according to Ali, “if the Iraqi government was able to supply the electricity that the people demanded, the Iraqi economy would have been 140 trillion dinars larger than what it was” (just under 100 billion USD).

I wanted today’s post to be about the subject of electricity because I had to address it on different occasions this fall. First, for a course (on energy and economic development) in my MA program where I got the chance to look into Sub-Saharan Africa which the IEA once described as the “least understood region in the global energy system.”

Electricity problems are of course not confined to the Middle East. Africa has a young population that is growing rapidly and yet access to electricity is staggeringly behind. Of the estimated 600 million people that lacked access to electricity in Africa in 2022, 98% of them were based in Sub-Saharan Africa, according to CSIS.

In October, I also discussed access to natural gas in Iraq and electricity during a panel organized by the American University in Washington, DC, titled: “Leverage or Liability? Kurdistan’s Gas on the Iraqi & Regional Chessboard”, and which you can read a summary of here. In it, I said that while past risks posed by certain armed groups against energy infrastructure were mainly in southern Iraq, targeting US companies, the Kurdish region is now experiencing more of similar attacks. And the Khor Mor gas field which has become a repeated target, stands as the best example.

As I wrote on LinkedIn around a month ago, I’m a staunch believer that any country’s energy sector reflects its character. Through it, you can see success and innovation, willingness to cooperate with others and transfer knowledge; you see the recreation of a nation, sometimes. You can also see failure, top-brass corruption, lack of creativity, and human misery....the slow self-destruction of a country. Development and economic growth are a political choice. And the same goes for failure and bankruptcy, as my country, Lebanon, continues to show.

Thanks for reading THE CHOKEPOINT today.

If you’d like to get in touch with Balsam Abo Zour or check her authentic work, please visit her website here, and also her Instagram. Balsam is a Lebanese artist with over 25 years of experience specializing in oil painting, printmaking, sculpture, and illustration.