February 21, 2025
There have been fewer power outages in recent weeks as the Oil Ministry has labored to provide more fuel to power plants all across the country but on February 12, the lights (and everything else) went out across much of the capital.
This set off a nasty shouting match between the Energy Ministry, which provides electricity, and the Oil Ministry, which provides fuel to electricity generating plants. The Energy Ministry said flatly: “A number of power plants around the country have been put out of service due to lack of fuel.”
Oil Minister Mohsen Paknejad took great offense at that and responded that all the power plants in the Tehran area had received all the fuel they needed. “Therefore, the power outage, especially in eastern Tehran, was not due to fuel issues at these plants,” Paknejad said. Unfortunately, he did not say what caused the power outage.
Temperatures have been lower than normal in most parts of the country for the last several weeks, necessitating that more natural gas be devoted to heating and less to power generation. The government has responded by repeatedly calling on the public to turn their thermostats down by two degrees centigrade (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) and by closing schools and government offices quite often, disrupting a lot of lives. The government often leaves high schools open while shutting grammar schools.
The regime has also provided more natural gas to Iranian users by completely halting natural gas deliveries to Iraq, which uses the gas to produce about a third of its electricity supply. Iran ended the deliveries to Iraq in November, saying it was doing so for 15 days for necessary “maintenance.” Deliveries have not been resumed.
The government has also tried to keep up supplies of fuel to the public by shutting down deliveries of natural gas and electricity to industry. The Iranian Chamber of Commerce said this was costing the economy about a quarter billion dollars a day in lost production. The state news agency said about 40 percent of the country’s steel industry sits idle. Iran owns the world’s second largest reserves of natural gas after Russia.