Tripoli’s Al Robyan seafood restaurant offered a table laden with seafood in exchange for “some fuel for the generator” earlier this month, then posted on Facebook: “We’ve run out of earthly solutions.” That’s what Libya’s electricity crisis looks like on the ground now: restaurants bartering for fuel, businesses shutting their doors, and households losing the food in their freezers and fridges while the grid coughs out blackouts lasting between six and 10 hours almost daily.
A Grid Ruled by Fracture
The country’s power failure is not a mystery of nature. Libya generates roughly 70 percent of its electricity from natural gas, with oil providing almost all the rest, and the system has been left exposed by falling gas production, disruptions at fields and pipelines, years of underinvestment and corruption, and a decade of fractured governance. The result is a country rich in hydrocarbons and poor in electricity, a neat summary of what happens when rival authorities treat infrastructure like a spoil of power rather than a public necessity.
Alaeddin Muntasser, a retired businessman in Tripoli, said, “Since these massive shortages started, every business in Libya has been affected,” calling it an “electricity disaster.” He described a water-bottling plant hit so hard by the outages that “we had a shortage of drinking water for a couple of weeks. If they can’t pump or filter, they can’t bottle.” He said many small restaurants have shut down, while a few with generators managed to keep their ovens running. People in the worst-hit areas, he added, lost all the food in their freezers and fridges. The state’s monopoly on basic services has a way of turning dinner into spoilage.
The roots go back to 2011, when a Nato-backed uprising toppled and killed longtime leader Muammar Gaddafi. Libya then split into rival administrations: in the west, the internationally recognised government of Abdul Hamid Dbeibah; in the east, forces led by General Khalifa Haftar and foreign governments. Karim Elgendy, executive director of the Carboun Institute, said, “Oil wealth only becomes reliable electricity when institutions can convert it, and Libya’s institutions have been fractured for over a decade.” He added, “Rival authorities issue competing decisions over the same grid and the utility recovers almost none of its costs. Years of deferred maintenance have left the network running on ageing equipment with no margin for error. So every summer becomes a stress test the grid is not ready for.”
The Diplomacy of Shortages
The official response has been the usual choreography of state-to-state management. In January, Egypt and Libya signed a memorandum of understanding to deepen cooperation in the oil and gas sector. In July, Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty and other Egyptian officials met with senior Libyan officials, including National Oil Corporation chairman Massoud Suleman, to discuss deepening energy ties. After Libya’s blackouts throughout July, Tripoli turned in part to Egypt, which boosted electricity export capacity to Libya by approximately 43 percent, reaching 100 megawatts. Even that extra supply covered less than a tenth of Libya’s recent generation shortfall. Libya also settled outstanding dues to Egypt totaling around $90m.
Elgendy said, “The complementarity between the two economies is real: Libya has the hydrocarbons, Egypt has the refining, the generation fleet and the contractors.” But he also said, “genuine integration begins when both sides commit to a long-term commercial framework with obligations running both ways.” He warned that Egypt’s own power system leans heavily on imported gas it does not control, and that “a country importing electricity from Egypt is, indirectly, importing Egypt’s gas risk.” Cairo has already had to lean on Israel, signing a record $35bn gas deal with Israel in 2025 that almost tripled its gas imports from the Israeli Leviathan gas fields and marked the largest export deal in Israel’s history. The region’s energy system, in other words, is one long chain of dependency dressed up as cooperation.
Jalel Harchaoui, Libya specialist with the Royal United Services Institute, dismissed the Libya-Egypt energy outreach as “not to be taken seriously.” He said, “I think it would be very incorrect to say that the electricity situation is the reason for the meeting.” He called it “more of a diplomatic trick than something really genuine, especially during a summer when Libya itself is grappling with a very serious electricity crisis.”
Who Pays for the Grid’s Collapse
Harchaoui said Libya sits on abundant natural gas reserves both onshore and offshore, “but the error that Libya made, and it’s a profound error with long-time consequences, is that it hasn’t kept up in terms of natural gas production capacity.” Gas still accounts for roughly three-quarters of the country’s electricity output, yet years have passed “with no new natural gas project of any significance even being launched.” Existing assets have been “shrinking in terms of output,” and even a new project approved today would take “at least seven or eight years” before producing results. On current trends, he warned, Libya could within a few years be “humiliated to the point of having to import natural gas.”
He said part of the failure was cultural as much as technical. Libya operates with “the culture of a crude oil-producing country” that “just doesn’t think in terms of natural gas” as a priority, even though gas, not oil, is what keeps the lights on. Corruption has made the delay worse, not only by diverting money but by slowing decision-making itself. “To do a corrupt project, you need more time than to do an honest project, because you have to make sure all the key officials are satisfied with their bribes,” he said, alleging that some power plant units installed between 2022 and 2025 were purchased secondhand and passed off as new.
He also pointed to years of unfulfilled promises by the country’s prime minister, who has claimed since 2021 to have “resolved” the crisis, as one reason unrest has concentrated in the west, where protest is easier to organize than under Haftar’s tighter grip in the east. Blackouts are hitting the east and south too, he said, just less visibly and without the same political cost. The lights go out. The rulers keep talking.