This article is a more-serious look at the topic, goes into some of the contributing problems. It does sound like quite a mess.

https://merip.org/2024/07/off-the-grid-why-solar-wont-solve-lebanons-electricity-crisis/

Off the Grid—Why Solar Won’t Solve Lebanon’s Electricity Crisis

I do think that solar is often over-sold in terms of ignoring drawbacks, but according to this, the electrical utility was (until now) managing to provide about 6.5% of demand. When things are that bad, even erratic power from solar is going to beat erratic power from the grid.

The collapse was caused by successive, interacting crises. In 2019 Lebanon endured one of the severest economic downturns worldwide since the mid-nineteenth century. The August 2020 Beirut port explosion, the covid-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine compounded economic insecurity and precarity, leading to a significant rise in the prices of commodities, particularly fuel. The increase in fuel prices reduced the state’s electricity availability and placed additional strain on private generator suppliers.

EDL’s service declined rapidly at the end of 2020, when supply chain disruptions and rising fuel prices prompted the company to reduce the number of hours of electricity per day. The reduction happened without prior notice and varied by region, with power supply dwindling to between one and four hours.

Private generator companies were also caught off guard. Now tasked with bridging a wider power gap using the same infrastructure, these companies had to ration electricity. They attempted to establish schedules and anticipated downtime but frequently fell short of expectations. In October 2021, EDL ran out of fuel, plunging the country into darkness for 24 hours after resuming with only a few hours of electricity per day.

For several months, the total daily power supply remained under eight hours, with far-reaching consequences for businesses and households alike. Many eateries, small markets and supermarkets were forced to temporarily suspend operations to prevent food spoilage and foodborne illnesses. Others continued functioning with limited product variety, sometimes jeopardizing consumer safety. In households, refrigerators became storage units. The intermittent electricity supply could not ensure proper food preservation, and substantial amounts of food had to be thrown out. Dietary patterns shifted, as they do in times of war, moving away from perishable items, like dairy and meats, to non-perishable options as well as more vegetarian and vegan choices. These outages also created major financial strain: From November 2021 to January 2022, households, on average, spent 44 percent of their monthly salaries to cover generator costs.[5]

One strategy involved reducing household energy use through the availability of small, consumer technologies like 12-volt LED lights that connected to car batteries or small charging devices. Many started relying on UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) devices, which are meant to provide emergency backup power and surge protection to electronic equipment during power outages or fluctuations. Depending on the number of batteries added to the UPS, individuals could illuminate their homes more brightly or even operate a small functional fridge. These UPS systems were typically charged during brief periods of government-provided electricity, day or night.

The problem with tacking battery storage onto the thing in that context is that you’re basically just using it to game the rationing system. With something like solar or wind, the energy is inexpensive when it’s available. Solar and wind have problems with being intermittent, and adding buffering helps with that. But when you’re generating your electricity via oil, which is an expensive source of energy, then this just means that the people wealthy enough to do so will buy their own storage to suck more out of the state generation capacity when the grid is still active. Due to the costs of battery storage, that makes it more-expensive for them and it means that the people who can’t do that are getting an even smaller slice of the pie. It increases load when there is power being provided to the region and thus forces the government to have the power active for even less time in any given area.

Until mid-2022, EDL was still able to supply between one to four hours of electricity per day, depending on the region. In November of that year, it announced an increase in its tariff amounts. According to comments made at the time by the caretaker minister of energy, Walid Fayad, the increase was supposed to support reforms in the electricity sector and improvements to the grid to supply more power. While the aim was to increase the power supplied to ten hours per day, by 2023, EDL still only supplied 200 to 250 megawatts of power, only around 6.5 percent of the demand.[6]

The “solar boom” peaked as the energy crisis continued, but it came with its own problems: As new companies rushed to get in on the market, many of the installations were poorly implemented.[10] Furthermore, even for small-scale solar systems, installation costs per household are considerable and at times prohibitive. While the Lebanese government offers loans for solar power in Lebanese lira, people are reluctant to use the unstable currency. These loans are also difficult to access, and owing to the overall dysfunction of state institutions and processes, relatively few have been processed.

Even after installing solar panels many households and businesses could not achieve complete independence from private generator suppliers or government-generated electricity without also investing in storage. Consequently, diesel generators remain in use and continue emitting carbon. A more robust vision for decentralization would allow for interconnection between these distributed energy resources. But that would require a level of state or local government coordination that has yet to emerge.

The Lebanese Parliament also enacted the Distributed Renewable Energy Production Law, in December of 2023, which allows private entities to sell up to 10 megawatts of renewable power back to the grid. Net metering is not necessarily a panacea, however, as evidenced in the criticism leveled at similar initiatives in Jordan. While net metering has allowed for the proliferation of renewables into Jordan’s grid, the compensation scheme for selling power, according to critics, has meant that mostly wealthy and commercial participants in these programs benefit, while the state operates at a loss. By this logic, net metering could enable the upward redistribution of wealth through renewable energy.

In the face of these risks, Lebanon’s entrenched political class has made it difficult to achieve any kind of systemic change to the energy sector. The Lebanese government’s longstanding practice of withdrawing from public service provision or channeling resources through sectarian political organizations places a heavy burden on individuals and NGOs to fill the gaps.