Everyone agrees Tunisia ran short of power. Nobody agrees on by how much
STEG moved to planned load shedding on 16 July, and on 8 August it reported 18,294 callouts to restore power in the single week of 18 to 24 July. A report by the Observatoire tunisien de l'economie dated 1 August puts the fall in public investment in generation at 87 percent, from 1.947 billion dinars over 2016 to 2020 to 248 million over 2021 to 2025. The utility, the union, the doctors and the columnist below each answer a different question about that summer.
Where they agree
Trifa and Ben Ammar both treat the cuts as a deliberate measure rather than an unplanned failure, and both put July's demand above what the system could supply. Dhakar and Albouchi take the outages as given and argue from their effects, on the hospitals and on the fact that they keep happening.
Where they split
Trifa explains the cuts by the weather and by consumption. Ben Ammar explains them by a ministry that will not release information and by investment moved from generation to the grid. Dhakar argues from the hospitals, saying the cuts should not have reached health facilities at all. Albouchi locates the failure in an administration where, on a former minister's account, projects stay in the drawer.
What nobody is saying
The union puts consumption above 6,000 megawatts on 23 July against 4,685 megawatts available, while the Observatoire tunisien de l'economie's 1 August report works from the record of 4,888 megawatts set on 14 August 2024 and does not use the higher number. STEG has published no peak figure for July, and has confirmed neither.
He traces the cuts to an exceptional heatwave, record demand and technical constraints on the network, and presents load shedding as what keeps the system from collapsing altogether. On national radio on 21 July he asked households to cut consumption between 13:00 and 17:00 and to avoid the most energy-hungry appliances in that window.
He says it is the ministry, not STEG, that is withholding information, and that the Ministry of Industry, Mines and Energy opposes the company's wish to warn people before cuts. He puts production capacity on 23 July at 4,685 megawatts against consumption above 6,000. On his figures, investment in generation fell from 146 million dinars in 2022 to 5 million in 2025, while transmission drew 273 million and distribution 178 million.
”le ministère de l'Industrie, des Mines et de l'Énergie qui refuse d'informer les citoyens sur la réalité de la situation énergétique du pays”the Ministry of Industry, Mines and Energy, which refuses to inform citizens about the real state of the country's energy situation
He says the cuts should reach neither households nor health facilities, and that some hospitals have no working generators or can run only part of their services on them. He points to the hospital in Mahdia, which drew water from nearby residents after disruption to the SONEDE water network. He also describes a cut at the neonatal intensive care unit at Wassila Bourguiba in La Rabta, where doctors were called in to ventilate newborns by hand, and states that no death followed.
She reports a former minister telling her that as long as people are not driven by a sense of the public interest, every project stays in the drawer, and calling that the bitter lesson of his time in the ministry. She declines to read that as a lack of civic spirit among public employees.
”lorsqu'une panne devient récurrente, elle cesse d'être un simple incident technique. Elle devient le symptôme d'un système”when a breakdown becomes recurrent, it stops being a simple technical incident. It becomes the symptom of a system