An anthropologist examines whether Lebanese turning to solar energy is a story of resilience, ecological triumph, or something else.
After an absence of several years, I have recently returned to Lebanon, where I have been conducting ethnographic research for more than a decade. In the intervening years, the pandemic erupted, the country’s economy collapsed, and Lebanese rallied in the streets to demand the removal of the government and the reform of the sectarian and corrupt political system.
The landscape I knew so well showed signs of turmoil. With the dramatic decline in tourism, hotels have been closed. Downtown Beirut, scene of the October 2019 anti-government protests, was deserted and filled with boarded-up windows and graffiti-covered walls. When I checked into my Airbnb rental in the upscale Achrafieh neighborhood, the owner of the apartment explained that one of the large windows that line the main living area hadn’t properly closed since it was repaired after the Beirut Port explosion three miles away in August 2020 . He picked up a small piece of glass from the window frame and handed it to me. “Here,” he said dryly, “this is your souvenir of the explosion.”
This wall of windows on the seventh floor offered a panoramic view of a lively Beirut neighborhood filled with other residential and high-rise buildings. But at night the sight of these buildings had a chilling effect: they were all dark.
In recent years, the Lebanese have faced devastating electricity shortages amid rising inflation, unemployment and poverty rates. But as I settled in, I noticed something I’d never seen in the city before: solar panels were popping up everywhere. From the roofs and porches of residential buildings to commercial facilities, people now sourced their own electricity to light 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 fund reconstruction after the country’s devastating 15-year civil war (1975–1990). Today, Lebanon’s national debt has skyrocketed to $85 billion – almost half of which has been spent on the power sector.
Over the years, political actors with interests in the fossil fuel-dependent electricity supply chain have paid large subsidies to state-owned electricity company Electricité du Liban (EDL), using money from Lebanese savers. These corrupt acts contributed to the collapse of the lira, the country’s currency, which has lost 90 percent of its value over the past three years. US sanctions on Syria have further exacerbated the problem by making it more difficult to import energy resources from other nearby countries such as Egypt and Jordan.
The government is facing bankruptcy and has found it can no longer afford to import or subsidize fuel. While EDL has been suffering from supply shortages for decades, in October 2021 the country’s power plants completely ran out of diesel fuel, causing a nationwide blackout. For more than a year, the company has only been supplying a meager two hours of electricity per day.
As scientists working in the region have shown, the collapse of the state has meant that many Lebanese have been forced to find ways to access basic services and supplies, including electricity. Many rely on expensive and polluting diesel powered generators run by private contractors. Run by a small group of businessmen with ties to officials and fuel importers, these suppliers effectively manage a private electricity market and have come to be known colloquially as the “generator mafia”.
The electricity in the apartment I rented alternated between the minimum government supply and supplemental generator power purchased and provided by all occupants of the building. Just before I arrived in Beirut, the apartment owners told me the good news that they would now pay a generator supplier for an additional surcharge that would increase the number of hours of electricity supplied from 16 to 24 hours per day. Living at the top of the Lebanese electricity hierarchy meant I had electricity in my apartment when the rest of the building didn’t — a fact I would discover when confronted with the building’s non-working elevator.
In this context, where people are responsible for sourcing their own energy, the solar energy movement emerged.
Many of the solar panels that caught my eye in Beirut were installed in high- and mid-range buildings. And yet, in a city marked by intense and visible class divisions, solar cells did not seem to belong only to the privileged. Sitting in traffic in southern Beirut’s Sabra neighborhood, where generations of displaced people live in substandard living conditions and informal housing developments, I saw solar panels on the roof of a dilapidated, detached, single-story concrete house.
The growth of solar panels wasn’t an exclusively urban phenomenon either, as I realized a few days later as I left Beirut for the mountains. At a family friend’s house in the village of Azounieh in the Shouf region, I climbed up to the second floor patio area and looked out at the view.
“Wow,” I said to my friend Younis (a pseudonym), “here in the village, people have solar panels too!” He smiled and pointed to his own roof, where solar panels were hovering over the chicken coop and clothesline.
Younis told me he lost his job in housing construction. Work was impossible without power tools, and generators were too expensive to run all day. Younis described how life without electricity had affected his entire family. Even water was often unavailable, as electricity is usually required in Lebanon to pump water into homes. “You feel the pressure when you come home to a dark house and the neighbor’s lights come on,” Younis told me. “I felt bad. The kids couldn’t access the wifi; there was no hot water; I had to do something.”
In order to be able to afford the modules, Younis had received a loan of US$3,500 directly from a private solar module company. The government also offers loans for solar panels, but only with Lebanese lira. “But the lira is so unstable,” Younis explained. “People could end up paying double for it.” The solar panels, he said, although he funds them, have eased the immediate pressure on his family.
Back in Beirut one night, I noticed sparks flying from a porch across the street. Worried that a fire might break out, I went to the window wall in the living room area and saw workers assembling a metal frame. The next day, they used a pulley to pull up solar panels for installation.
How were the panels paid for? I wondered. And how would the electricity they provide change the everyday life of the residents of the apartment?
It’s tempting to celebrate the growth of solar panels as yet another story of Lebanese resilience – or a story of ecological triumph. But the solar panel movement is actually a story about people being increasingly forced to take the financial responsibility for procuring basic services that failing governments have denied them.
In this sense, Lebanon’s solar panels capture the immediacy and intensity of what the World Bank has described as one of the world’s worst economic crises since the mid-19th century.
Still, there is undeniably something illuminating about Lebanon’s solar panels. As Younis’ story shows, the bodies are a double-edged sword: many Lebanese are further burdened with debt by funding their own solutions to the economic and political collapse. But by enabling people to power their homes, solar panels have also helped restore some normality and alleviate hardship – and allowed people to regain dignity lost during the country’s collapse.
Kristin V. Monroe is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Kentucky and Associate Editor of the journal City & Society. Her research focuses on experiences of mobility, urban life, political violence and citizenship in the Middle East. She is working on a project funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation on mobility in the Syrian war landscape.
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