Emergency fuel restores electricity in Lebanon

BEIRUT — Lebanon’s sputtering national electricity grid went back online Sunday after the army provided emergency fuel supplies to the government, temporarily easing a daylong outage that served as the latest ramification of the country’s economic collapse.

The two main power plants, chronically short of fuel, had been providing only a few hours of electricity per day before Saturday, when they ran out of fuel and stopped working completely.

Walid Fayyad, the energy minister, said Sunday that the army had supplied fuel from its reserves to the power plants and that the network had resumed “normal” operation — suggesting it would go back to producing a few hours of power per day.

Even so, the emergency supplies are expected to last only a few days. Fayyad said that Lebanon’s central bank had freed up $100 million to be used to import fuel, which would help raise electricity generation by the end of the month.

The outage Saturday had little immediate effect on the lives of most Lebanese, who have grown accustomed to blackouts and fuel shortages as the country suffers one of the gravest economic crises in recent history. The government has struggled to import fuel as the national currency has shed 90 percent of its value in the past two years.

The crisis has presented an opportunity for Iran and its proxy in Lebanon, the militant group Hezbollah.

In recent weeks, Iran has sent fuel by tanker ship to Syria, where Hezbollah organized caravans to drive it into Lebanon. The operation defies sanctions by the United States on the purchase of Iranian oil and has happened outside of the Lebanese state.

Visiting Lebanon last week, Iran’s foreign minister, Hossein Amir Abdollahian, said Iran was ready to build two new power plants able to meet a third of the country’s electricity demands.

Critics say Iran and its allies are more interested in media stunts than in real aid, that the fuel it has sent is little in comparison to Lebanon’s needs and that the proposed Iranian power plants are unlikely to ever be built.

The United States has thrown its support behind plans to have natural gas sent via pipeline from Jordan through Syria to Lebanon, or to have electricity generated in Jordan transmitted to Lebanon.