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Beyond the Grid: Exploring Municipal Beirut’s Hybrid Energy Infrastructure

15.09.2025

planning actors and scales

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urban informality

Electricity, Energy Provision, Hybrid System, Energy Inequality, Neighborhood Generators, Informal Providers, Territorial Supply, Lebanon, Beirut
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In Beirut, electricity is not delivered. It is secured. It comes from generators hidden in basements, from solar panels on rooftops, and from wires strung across buildings and connected to noisy, polluting generators in the streets. Almost every household is connected to at least two sources of energy to secure its daily needs, often more. This hybridized service provision may reflect the resourceful and inventiveness of city-dwellers, but it also betrays fragile and deeply unequal models of energy distribution.

 

Neighborhood generators are the most common form of electricity provision in the city. These generators are run by private (informal) operators who divide the city into territories of supply. Although theoretically illegal, since the Lebanese state holds a monopoly over electricity through Électricité du Liban (EDL), these providers have become the backbone of daily provision for the city’s residents.

Project Advisors: Mona Fawaz, Ahmad Gharbieh

Research Coordinator: Antonia Maria Bahna

Visualization & GIS Mapping Team: Abir Cheaitly, Shareef Tarhini, Nour Zoghbi-Fares

Fieldwork Team: Riham Abou Ali, Karim Chaltaf, Ali Ghadar, Dima Haydamous, David Wehbe

 

 

Click here to explore the storymap

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In response to demands from activists seeking to better understand this opaque market and to advocate for more just energy provision, the Beirut Urban Lab set out to investigate the under-researched practices of energy provision and energy providers. This storymap presents a first attempt to bring together the findings of two surveys conducted in 2023 and 2024/2025. The first survey covered, a citywide representative sample of residential buildings, documenting the sources of electricity supply at the building and household levels. The second survey conducted a street-by-street mapping of active generator providers and recorded their pricing schemes. Together, these two surveys expose sharp inequalities in energy access, territorial monopolies that trap residents in captive markets, and widespread non-compliance with official pricing and regulations.
Providers Compliance Status
Providers Compliance Status
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The storymap provides a snapshot and analyses of Beirut’s hybrid electricity system, focusing on informal providers. Click here to read the analysis and check out the interactive maps as part of the Beirut Built Environment Database by clicking on this link.