June 18, 2025
Rolling electricity black outs have begun all across Iran, far earlier than they have started in prior years, showing that the country’s electricity shortage is worse than before.
The government has ordered the steel, concrete and aluminum industries—which consume vast quantities of electricity—to severely reduce their activities. That will save power for residences—but it will also drive production down and might spark a recession.
The rolling blackouts are supposed to come on a published schedule of two-hour shutdowns so people can plan their lives better. But the electricity is often turned off at times other than the published list says and they of ten last far more than two hours.
What this means is that people are getting stuck in elevators for hours, that drivers suddenly find traffic lights are not working, and that water pumps do not send water to the higher stories of apartment houses when the tap is turned on.
Water levels are low behind many dams all around the country. But less information on the water supply is now being published so it is anything but clear when the taps may go dry even when electricity is operating the pumps. The water levels behind most dams are so low that two thirds of the country’s dams have reportedly ceased generating electricity in order to preserve water for nearby cities.
Amir Jadidi, a journalist with the pro-Reform daily HamMihan, recently wrote sarcastically about his personal experience. “My modest Tehran apartment is inside a 40-unit building, where, without a pump, water no longer reaches us. I turn on the tap—the pipe howls and shakes like it is possessed. Seconds later, the shower coughs and starts dripping like an IV. Not even enough for a cat wash. I give up, blow out the candles and step out of the bathroom. The next hour is spent waiting for an Edison-style miracle on the couch.”
Officials, including President Pezeshkian, are proving to be very good at apologies, but not so good at turning the lights back on.
Blackouts in Tehran don’t usually begin until June—when air conditioners are going full tilt. The blackouts started May 6 this year. Officials explain that it has gotten hotter earlier in the season this year so more air conditioners are being used. At the same time, power plants have, as usual, shut down capacity for maintenance in the spring and been caught by the early heat wave.
The government has ordered schools to open at 6 a.m. and close at 1 p.m. Bus service now starts at 5:30 a.m. The idea is that school kids will be back at home during the hottest hours and schools won’t be running any air conditioners. When the schools are open, rooms are not to be cooled below 25 degrees Celsius (77 Fahrenheit). Starting May 10, government and private offices were also to operate from 6 a.m. to 1 p.m. Temperatures there are not to be lower than 27 degrees Celsius (81 Fahrenheit).
The irony is that the Majlis spent weeks debating whether to advance the clocks and re-adopt daylight saving time, which had been abandoned three years ago. That would have addressed the power problem. However, the deputies couldn’t agree on any clock change, so the government then changed working hours, which will inconvenience people much more.
A major controversy has risen with reports that blackouts in Tehran are longer in more southerly (i.e., poorer) districts. The daily Farhikhtegan, which is owned by the Islamic Azad University and is not a Reformist publication, was the first to report the inequality in an article titled “Unequal share of darkness.” Tavanir, the national electricity monopoly, denied the story, and Farhikhtegan removed it from its website.
However, other newspapers and social media continue to carry reports on stark inequalities, baldly saying that rich Tehranis have made sure they do not suffer as much as their poor fellow citizens. Montreal-based IranWire said northern neighborhoods faced only 1 percent of the city’s blackouts while poorer southern districts endured 32 percent of the burden. It didn’t explain where it got those statistics or how they were collected. (What percentage of the population suffered 32 percent of the blackouts? If it was 45 percent of the population, what’s to complain about. If it were 25 per cent, then there would be a bias. The story didn’t say.)
The daily Ham-Mihan quoted a south Tehran resident as saying he routinely had two blackouts each day, sometimes two hours long. And it quoted a resident of District 2 in the far north as saying his residence had suffered no blackouts thus far. It quoted an unnamed power official as saying, “To maintain network stability, we concentrate outages in outlying districts.” It also quoted him as saying, “Blackouts in central and northern Tehran have political and media consequences that we try to avoid.”
Several Majlis deputies have said outright that southern Tehran neighborhoods suffer more of the burden than northern neighborhoods.
The southern part of the country is also complaining. Many southern cities are seeing daytime highs of 45 degrees Celsius (113 Fahrenheit) or even more. Those cities are saying they shouldn’t be obligated to endure blackouts at the same (or greater) rate than cooler northern cities. Majlis Deputy Mojtaba Yusefi of Ahvaz said, “Even during the war [in the 1980s], we did not see such frequent power outages.”
The National Weather Bureau said that nine provinces (including Tehran) so far this year have seen temperatures 6 degrees (11 Fahrenheit) higher than the long-term average while 19 have seen averages 4 degrees (7 Fahrenheit) above the long-term average. Only Kurdistan, Gilan and Ardebil have seen normal temps.
A journalist quoted her brother-in-law as saying, “The government can’t be blamed for the lack of rain [to fill the reservoirs]. To be fair, it can’t be blamed for worn-out infrastructure either—or for sanctions, or the failure to coordinate basic [blackout] schedules. It has just one job—to make your lives miserable. And it has performed that to perfection, if your faces lit up by your phones’ glow are any indication.”
The government announced May 19 that it has cut off the electricity to 1,000 Tehran residences for gross overuse of power. It said that 3 percent of residential users were consuming 11 percent of the capital’s total power supply.
When the power was on, many Tehranis watched news reports of President Trump’s trip to Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE. Many told The New York Times they were incensed. “We are worried about riding the elevator at work, and they are getting artificial intelligence technology,” said one man.
Many said they watched the trip unfold with a mix of “envy, regret and anger at their government.” They said the visit crystallized for them how Iran’s development had been held back by regime mismanagement and obsessive ideology.
Hamid Asefi, a political analyst in Tehran, said, “We could have been like the Arabs. We have the geography, the natural resources and the human talent to be a major economic power. But the regime’s anti-American ism and anti-Israeli ideology has put us where we are.”
Eshaq Jahangiri, who was first vice president under President Hassan Rohani, gave a speech May 15 in which he said, “I felt embarrassed when the president of America was describing Iran in Saudi Arabia [see speech text on Page 11 of this is sue]. We weren’t supposed to be described in this cruel way even by our enemy. We could have been the No. 1 power in this region.” He blamed sanctions and the overpowering ideology of some factions for Iran’s current state.
It wasn’t just Reformists carping. Milad Gudarzi, a conservative media personality, told the regime, “The biggest thing the enemy exploits—at the negotiating table and in rhetoric—is your incompetence.”
On May 15, the government told the steel, concrete and aluminum industries to shut down for two weeks in order to conserve electricity until power plants finish their annual maintenance cycles and come back online. The reaction was anything but positive.
The Energy Ministry then published an order covering the full summer and dividing industry into three categories. Steel must shut down all production for two weeks each month. Concrete and aluminum plants must reduce electricity consumption by 30 percent over the summer. In a third category, which includes industrial estates, a combination of outright closures and consumption limits is being planned.
Electricity will be priced at a lower rate in the off-peak hours of 11 p.m. to 6 a.m., suggesting that industrial plants might shift their daytime operations to the graveyard shift.
The government, by the way, never speaks of a “shortage” of electricity. It uses the term “imbalance,” regularly citing the imbalance between supply and demand as if that somehow would make the heat and darkness more bearable.