By Hugh Naylor – Washington Post

ZAHLE, Lebanon — Something remarkable
is happening in this Lebanese farming town. Roads are no longer dark at
night, and water is pumped to homes without interruption. There’s electricity here in Zahle, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

And
if you don’t think that’s a big deal, ask residents of just about any
other town in this tiny country. They endure daily outages that can last
18 hours, so they pay exorbitant fees to opportunistic owners of
private electricity generators to get enough power. In fact,
millions of people across the Middle East are dealing with worsening
power cuts. The issue fed the frustrations behind the Arab Spring
revolts of 2011 and presents a daunting challenge for the region’s growing populations, including in war-torn countries such as Yemen and Iraq.

But
in Zahle, a town of about 150,000 in Lebanon’s scenic Bekaa Valley,
residents overcame energy woes with political will and creativity,
offering the rest of the region possible lessons for a way to obtain
reliable and affordable electricity.

“What’s happened in
Zahle and its environs is a huge achievement, and it gives hope that our
experience with 24-hour electricity could be replicated far beyond,”
said Elie Marouni, a member of parliament from the town.

[Epic heat wave could be global warming’s hellish curtain-raiser ]

Last
year, officials at Zahle’s power company braved death threats from the
town’s generator owners (referred to by residents as “the Mafia”) as
they built a power plant that services the town and surrounding
municipalities.

Most residents backed construction of the area’s
sole power plant, which cut the generator operators out of the market
and nearly halved monthly energy bills.

“It’s a miracle!” said Elias Akiki, a 75-year-old owner of souvenir shop in Zahle. “We were suffocating before all this.”

Lebanon’s
power cuts started during the civil war years, from 1975 to 1990. And
they still bedevil most of the 4 million citizens of this Mediterranean
country.

Lights and televisions still abruptly shut off multiple
times a day. In some areas, the outages prevent municipalities from
pumping water to homes and businesses.

Backup
generators offer only limited amounts of energy. When they kick in,
people can use an appliance or two at their homes and businesses, but
any more risks overloading the circuits.

“It’s a long-standing
crisis here, and it is only getting worse,” said Jihan Seoud, a
Lebanon-based energy and environment expert at the U.N. Development
Program.

The reasons for Lebanon’s outages are complex.

More than a million Syrians fled their civil war for refuge here, badly straining electricity supplies.

The
Lebanese tend to blame their dysfunctional government. Squabbling
politicians have failed to agree on a new president for more than two
years, leaving the key post vacant during that time. They have struggled
with even seemingly minor things such as trash collection
in Beirut, the capital. And the quarreling partly explains why no new
power plants have been built since the 1990s, apart from Zahle’s, and
why existing facilities produce just over half of the electricity the
country needs.

Corruption plays a major role, said Marwan
Iskander, a Lebanese economist. Patronage from powerful figures has
allowed many subscribers to the national electricity network to get away
with not paying their bills.

“I even know one former parliamentarian who literally owes millions of dollars in unpaid electricity bills,” Iskander said.

[In Syria’s war, a young girl is left deaf and hopeless]

The outages in Zahle worsened in recent years, sometimes lasting an entire day.

The
town’s old power plant was destroyed during the civil war. So the local
power company, Electricité de Zahlé (EDZ), contracted a British firm to
build and help operate a 60-megawatt plant, which went online in March
2015.

Until then, EDZ had only acted as a distributor of electricity, which it received from the state power firm.

“I
got tired — we all got tired — of promises by the government that there
would be 24/7 electricity. It just never happened, so we decided to
act,” said EDZ’s chief executive, Assaad Nakad.

Government
officials pressured Nakad to stop the project, but he said he fought
them off by invoking a law from the 1920s that gives EDZ the right to
generate and distribute its own electricity.

Officials from the
electricity ministry and state power firm did not respond to questions
by telephone and text message about the issue.

Nakad’s family
received anonymous death threats during the plant’s construction, and
unidentified assailants shot several of EDZ’s transformers. A group of
men who supplied the town’s private generators with fuel stormed into
his office with an ultimatum, Nakad said.

“They said they’d kill me if I built the plant,” he said. “These men had a lot to lose.”

The
town’s mayor, Assaad Zougheib, said the three-dozen or so generator
owners would regularly dismiss requests to lower their fees. And some of
them became extravagantly wealthy, residents said.

“My uncle owned several generators,” said Charbel Boieny, who runs a candy shop in Zahle. “He owns six villas.”

Around
the time of the plant’s construction, residents said they faced
intimidation from the generator owners. One sent cronies to the home of
Wassim Teenny and told him that he couldn’t unhook from the neighborhood
generator.

“They also demanded that we give them extra money,
but everyone in the neighborhood refused to do what they told us,” said
Teenny, 27, who works at a paint company.

Fast forward to the
present day, and Zahle’s new power plant is supplying constant
electricity to an estimated 250,000 people in the area. And Sami Saqer,
52, a farmer, is pocketing thousands of dollars that he used to spend on
generator costs to pump groundwater for his fields of potatoes, wheat
and squash.

“I can even farm at night if I want,” he said, pointing to street lamps near his crops.

Even
generator operators like George al-Youssef, who is now out of work,
acknowledge that Zahle is better off. Youssef, 66, complained that
electricity prices in the town are still high relative to other
countries.

But, he said, “The prices are lower than before.”

Suzan Haidamous contributed to this report.