Power and water cuts

Trifa presents the cuts as controlled and preventive. Afternoon demand ran about 30 percent above normal during the heatwave, he says, and supply from Algeria was weak because Algeria was under the same heat. Planned load-shedding lasts no more than an hour, and anything longer is a technical fault rather than a deliberate cut. Sensitive and strategic sites are spared. In his account the cause sits outside the utility: the temperature, the air conditioning that follows it, and Algeria's shortfall.

”la STEG se trouve obligée de recourir au délestage (coupure d'électricité préventive et temporaire), afin de maintenir un équilibre entre production et consommation”STEG finds itself obliged to resort to load-shedding (a preventive and temporary power cut), in order to maintain a balance between production and consumption

Mnaja traces the dry taps to the grid. SONEDE runs about 1,500 electrically powered pumping stations and is STEG's main customer, so power cuts can lower water output and make distribution fluctuate. He says SONEDE is not cutting the water at all: what it applies is an adjustment between available supply and demand, set by production capacity and technical constraints. Night-time adjustments continue on Tunisia's central coast until new water infrastructure is running. He expects no major disruption on that coast in the summer of 2027, thanks partly to the Kalâa Kebira treatment plant due in December 2026.

”La mission de la SONEDE est d'assurer l'approvisionnement en eau des citoyens, sauf dans des circonstances exceptionnelles et indépendantes de sa volonté”SONEDE's mission is to guarantee citizens' water supply, except in exceptional circumstances beyond its control

Msalmi says the shortfall was forecast and then ignored. STEG warned the authorities in 2024 that a deficit of about 800 MW was coming, he says, and the investment never followed. He puts summer demand near 5,800 MW against about 4,200 MW of available capacity, which left rotating cuts as the only way to hold the network up. Without them, he says, the country could have gone to a general blackout. He dates the commissioning of the last big plant on the grid, Radès C, to 2020 and 2021. Inkyfada dates that same commissioning to 2022.

”Les agents ne doivent pas payer le prix de l'absence de réaction des autorités”The staff must not pay the price for the authorities' failure to act

Gouiaa's answer is legal rather than technical. His organisation says it will file a complaint against STEG, and more than 30 lawyers have volunteered to help firms document their losses and claim compensation. He names private clinics, restaurants and cafés among the businesses hit, and says more than 70 percent of cafés were affected.

”Nous avons confiance dans une justice équitable. Notre rôle est de protéger l'économie tunisienne ainsi que l'entreprise tunisienne, qui contribue à la création de richesse, à la croissance et à l'emploi”We have confidence in a fair justice system. Our role is to protect the Tunisian economy and the Tunisian firm, which contributes to wealth creation, growth and employment

Kanzari accepts that demand outran available capacity. He puts the cause in missing investment in new plant and in delayed renewable projects, which left Tunisia importing part of its electricity from Algeria and Libya. His answer is decentralised: simpler administrative procedures, cheaper photovoltaic equipment, and a national energy-citizenship programme letting a million families install free solar systems over five years. That, he says, could add close to 600 MW. Solar with battery storage, in his view, is one of the fastest ways to take pressure off the grid.

The presidency says that where a cut cannot be avoided, citizens must be told in advance and the hours chosen with care. Its communique calls outages of more than twenty-four hours unacceptable, and calls the water cuts, the power cuts and the wildfires, taken together, abnormal phenomena. The state, it says, will not stand with its arms folded before anyone seeking to harm citizens and stoke tension.

”phénomènes hors normes”abnormal phenomena