Iranians suffer from power blackouts during war and heatwave

Tehran, Iran – On a subway car in the Iranian capital, Kamran and Moein, two students at Sharif University of Technology, are glued to a mobile phone, watching a viral video of a frustrated ice cream vendor bursting with anger after 180kg (400lb) of his merchandise melted because of power cuts.

The video resonated with 22-year-old Kamran. Just a few days earlier, power outages led to his university’s servers going offline during final exams. As a result, the electronic exam platforms went missing, and 38 tests were postponed until next month.

“The blackouts have derailed and disturbed all of our plans,” Kamran told Al Jazeera. “You lose the will to even study because you never know if the exam will actually happen. You could study all night, only to wake up and find everything cancelled because of electricity cuts.”

For 24-year-old Moein, the crisis is about more than postponed university exams. “Ask the patients who rely on ventilators in their homes or those storing vital medicines in refrigerators,” he said. “For them, a power cut isn’t a delayed exam. It’s a matter of life or death. We only see the tip of the iceberg.”

Broken promises and bombed infrastructure

The crisis cuts deeper for many Iranians because it contradicts a string of official assurances. Just days before the outbreak of the United States-Israel war on Iran in February, President Masoud Pezeshkian and Energy Minister Abbas Aliabadi promised a summer without electricity disruptions.

Those promises have evaporated during a severe heatwave and renewed US military strikes on southern Iran, turning sporadic outages into a daily reality across the nation.

When asked by a journalist about the sudden, unannounced blackouts, Tehran City Council Chairman Mehdi Chamran retorted: “If you knew how many electrical facilities were bombed two days ago, you wouldn’t ask this question.”

National electricity company CEO Mohammad Allahdad confirmed the scale of the devastation, citing a 4,200-megawatt drop in grid capacity and damage to more than 2,000 points across the network. Local media reported that US strikes on a power plant on Kish Island and severe damage to distribution networks in Bandar Abbas, Jask and Chabahar have compounded technical failures driven by the extreme heat.

Small-business owners increasingly rely on noisy portable generators on city sidewalks to save perishable goods from spoiling during the sudden outages [Rasol Alhaei/Al Jazeera]

An Al Jazeera tour of Tehran revealed a city adapting to chronic shortages. Small business owners rely on noisy portable generators to save perishable goods. Large digital billboards sit dark, and police officers manually direct traffic at major intersections where traffic lights have failed. Hospitals, however, have largely remained insulated, relying on back-up systems to keep intensive care units operating while surrounding neighbourhoods plunge into darkness.

Digital billboards sit dark across Tehran as the overstretched national grid struggles to meet basic demand [Rasol Alhaei/Al Jazeera]

A bitter paradox

Why is the energy deficit persisting, especially when major industrial consumers are offline? Bahman Arman, an economics professor at Tehran University and former adviser to the Ministry of Industry, Mine and Trade, noted a paradox in the country’s energy consumption.

Iran’s largest electricity consumers, the Mobarakeh Steel Company in Isfahan and Khouzestan Steel, essentially stopped drawing power after being hit by joint US-Israeli air strikes during what is known in Iran as the Ramadan War. “Mobarakeh alone consumed about 1,400 megawatts and Khouzestan about 600. That theoretically should have added 2,000 megawatts back to the national grid,” Arman told Al Jazeera.

But the Mahshahr petrochemical complex, which previously generated a surplus for the national grid, was also bombed. “Now, instead of supplying power, it relies on the grid to meet its own needs,” Arman explained. “A source of surplus has become a source of deficit.”

Despite heavy rains boosting hydroelectric output this year, an underlying rot in the system remains the primary culprit.

“The war was merely the straw that broke the camel’s back,” Arman said. “The root of the crisis is chronic underinvestment. We have a massive rate of energy loss in the grid, ageing transmission lines and a failure to build new plants. The heatwave simply exposed this deficit for all to see.”

Chronic underinvestment, enormous energy loss in the grid and ageing transmission networks remain the deep-rooted causes behind Iran’s severe energy deficit [Rasol Alhaei/Al Jazeera]

The industrial toll

Arman insisted the only short-term fix is upgrading existing plants while long-term megaprojects – like the proposed Bakhtiari Dam, which could generate 2,600 megawatts – require an injection of $500m in foreign currency and up to five years to complete. Iran no longer has the luxury of time.

Meanwhile, the burden on the industrial sector threatens to cripple the broader economy. Hossein Selahvarzi, former head of the Iran Chamber of Commerce, Industries, Mines and Agriculture, warned that industrial zones are facing blackouts of four to six hours a day.

“Restricting power to industrial units slashes production, drives up costs, delays orders and halts exports,” Selahvarzi told Al Jazeera. The power restrictions, combined with the devastating infrastructural damage from the war, have placed immense pressure on Iran’s nonoil exports engine.

With winter gas shortages already a recurring annual threat, the coming months look bleak for factory owners trying to recover from wartime losses. For Iranians, the question echoing across their darkened streets is how long can they endure a crisis in which the ravages of war meet decaying infrastructure with no quick solutions in sight.