While Egypt Grapples with Fuel Shortages and Power Cuts, One Village Never Goes Dark

On the sweltering summer nights when Egypt struggled with power cuts, a small village nestled in the Nile Delta remained alight.

In June, reeling from a shortfall of foreign reserves and a natural gas shortage, Egypt introduced new measures to cope with a relentless summer heatwave that has strained the national electricity grid.

For nearly two months, the government implemented daily three-hour power outages across households, reduced night-time street lighting, and imposed a 10 p.m. curfew on shops and commercial spaces, all as part of a broader load-shedding program to save costs. The frequency of outages was reduced in August, after Egypt received two shipments of natural gas as part of its urgent plan to end the load-shedding program. In September, Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly announced that there would be no more electricity cuts in Egypt as the government is “working to secure fuel shipments and managing the entire system to prevent power outages and avoid a significant fuel bill this coming summer.”

Yet, while Cairo struggled to stay alight during the height of the crisis, a humble, underdeveloped village in the countryside, nearly 100 kilometers (62 miles) away, far less modern than the mighty capital, continued to shine, seemingly unfazed by the energy crisis that was the top topic of Egyptian households last summer.

This month’s newsletter, written by journalist Fatma Badwy and realized in collaboration with Egab, takes us to al-Basaisa, a village in the Nile Delta that has been investing in solar power since the early 1980s, pioneering a transition the entire country has only recently begun to explore.

Walking down the narrow, dirt roads of Sharqia governorate’s al-Basaisa, it is nearly impossible not to notice that every home is topped with solar panels. Unlike most Egyptian households, air conditioners and fans here are running uninterrupted, and at night, solar-powered lighting poles keep the village alight.

Residents of al-Basaisa said that their village is "leading the rest of the country in the use of solar panels to produce clean energy." The village is reportedly "no longer relying on fuel-based power generation plants."

According to independent energy think tank Ember, wind and solar energy sources comprised about five percent of Egypt’s electricity in 2023, a figure that is below the global average of 13 percent. But the North African nation remains ambitious, announcing plans in April to increase its share of energy from renewable sources to 42 percent by 2035.

Egypt has managed to attract investments in several megaprojects to meet its ambitious energy targets. The Abydos Solar Grid in Upper Egypt’s Sohag province, scheduled for completion in 2025, will have a capacity of 560 megawatts. The Scatec Solar Plant in Qena, a southern Egyptian governorate, is expected to contribute 1 gigawatt (GW) to the national grid. Meanwhile, the Benban Solar Park in south Egypt’s Aswan, already operational, has a capacity of 1.5 GW.

But long before the Egyptian government turned its attention to solar power, Egyptian physicist Salah Arafa, a native of al-Basaisa and the pioneer behind its green revolution, recognized the potential of harnessing sunlight.

Upon returning from Sweden in 1978, Arafa successfully convinced the people of his village to adopt solar energy. The young scientist recognized how this abundant resource could reduce electricity costs for locals and minimize their emissions.

"I decided to work on this project for our rural communities, and I specifically chose al-Basaisa as a way to return to my roots and to fully utilize nature in every possible way," Arafa said. "Our first solar energy unit was a simple cell composed of a negatively charged electron and a positively charged ion that absorbed solar energy and converted it into electricity."