The owners of electric generators in Tyre let out a concerning cry on Tuesday; their fuel reserves have run out!
“Because of its loss in the market and its monopoly by some senior traders,” the southern city’s outraged generator owners said in a statement, they no longer have any diesel fuel reserves to keep electricity flowing in the region for long.
After the repercussions of fuel shortage manifested with the outages that the Lebanese telecoms networks have endured, the energy sector had it coming.
Now, like everything else in the country, Lebanon’s private electric generators industry, which barely makes up for the embarrassing fragility of Lebanon’s infrastructure, is weakening by the day.
In addition to the monopoly, smuggling diesel fuel to Syria is making it increasingly more difficult for generator owners to obtain their most essential resources.
Add to that the inescapable fact that the Lebanese pound is sliding into the abyss in the face of the US dollar.
At the time of writing, the USD/LBP exchange rate in the parallel local market has exceeded 6,000, compelling enraged citizens to the streets in protest.
With this insane increase naturally comes an insane increase in prices of local goods and commodities, not excluding, of course, the precious diesel fuel.
With that said, the top-of-the-food-chain traders remain a major cause of this disaster for the fact that they actively work to “monopolize diesel fuel and store away the quantities [they have] available,” as a generator owner told Al-Akhbar.
This claim can be supported by the aforementioned Tyre generator owners, who revealed that they had asked the director of Al-Zahrani facilities to sell them the combustible in order to supply locals with electricity, only for their request to be rejected.
“This is despite the fact that all stations have received diesel fuel from the Al-Zahrani facilities,” they explained.
This implies, as they stated, that there is now “a black market for the sale of diesel fuel, and the owners of the stations are waiting for the depletion of our diesel tanks to force us to buy [the fuel] at high prices from the black market.”
“Turning off the generators is beyond our control,” the statement concluded, “and, inevitably, the generators will turn off and Tyre will go dark.”
That is unless the tanks are refueled.
