This article is part of the July 2026 Libya Desk Energy Report, published by Global Insights Group, The Geopolitical Desk's sister company. Since 2021, Libya Desk has tracked Libya's oil and gas sectors on a monthly basis. Our full list of Libya services, including energy insights, can be found here:
Libya's electricity crisis escalated from seasonal grievance into a direct security threat in late July, when protesters stormed the Mellitah gas complex demanding gas be redirected to domestic power plants, but instead halted output at the complex and its associated El Feel and Wafa oil fields until government forces retook the site.
The crisis also reopened institutional blame-shifting between the Government of National Unity (GNU) and the General Electricity Company of Libya (GECOL), with Prime Minister Abdulhamid Dabaiba publicly branding the utility's leadership as failing and corrupt.
A closer look
Libya is accustomed to repeated electricity crises during the summer. This year was no outlier with extreme heat, reaching close to 47°C by late July, pushing demand well beyond generation capacity and causing outages of up to 20 hours a day in some areas.
Cognizant of the risk of popular uprising linked to demands for vital power, the GNU sought to pre-empt any overwhelming crisis by forming an emergency committee earlier in the month and involving the GECOL's general manager to identify causes of outages and develop a fairer load-shedding plan across regions.
That effort did little to prevent a failure in mid-July, triggered by the loss of roughly 1,350 megawatts of capacity and the sudden shutdown of the Gulf and Misrata power plants, which knocked out power across a stretch running from Misrata to Emsaad and destabilised the national grid at its most fragile point of the year.
Dabaiba used a cabinet meeting on July 18th to denounce GECOL's leadership directly, describing the sums already spent on the sector as wasted and accusing the utility's head of blocking government oversight - a recurrent criticism heard each year from Tripoli governments in the past decade.
Dabaiba blamed the renewed blackouts on corruption rather than a technical failure, pointing out that citizens had previously been told the crisis was resolved and encouraged to sell their private generators. That claim has some grounding: Libya had gone roughly two years without needing scheduled load-shedding before it returned this July.
A further collapse followed on July 19, when Unit Six and then Unit Four at the North Benghazi plant went offline alongside the Libya-Egypt interconnection line, blacking out the Benghazi-to-Tobruk corridor; Egypt resumed exports hours later after Libya settled $100 million of a $141 million debt.
The High Council of State (HCS) took a parallel but distinct line a week later, holding the GNU institutionally responsible as the GECOL's overseeing authority and calling on the Public Prosecutor to open a full inquiry into potential corruption and mismanagement in the sector.
