At the peak of a heatwave in which temperatures exceeded the 40 degrees Celsius barrier, wide areas of Giza Governorate sank into darkness and thirst, as a result of repeated outages of electricity and water that exceeded 24 hours in some neighbourhoods, while the scene looked like a total paralysis of daily life: lifts stopped, the internet was cut, cooling appliances stopped working, and thousands of families found themselves unable to obtain the bare minimum of their basic needs, especially in crowded or marginalised areas that already labour under the weight of poor services and infrastructure.
Despite the government’s repeated assurances of full preparedness for the summer and peak consumption, the events of recent days revealed deep imbalances in the structure of the electricity grid, which reached their peak in Giza Governorate, where wide areas of Omraniya, Haram, Faisal and Hawamdeya saw an almost complete power cut for continuous hours that exceeded 12 hours in some neighbourhoods, along with which a state of tension and confusion spread among the residents, especially in the absence of official explanations or prior notice.
According to data from the Ministry of Electricity, the crisis is due to a sudden technical fault in one of the circuits of the Gezirat El-Dahab transformer station (220 kV), which led to what is known as voltage withdrawal, meaning a partial loss of the power delivered to specific areas, which resulted in a large-scale power cut. However, this explanation, despite its technical validity, did not hide legitimate questions about the absence of emergency plans or distribution alternatives that are supposed to make up for any sudden malfunction in a station of this size.
Despite the efforts announced later to restore power gradually, the response appeared slower than expected, and statements varied about when electricity would return to the affected areas, which increased citizens’ anger and resentment. In the background, the national electricity grid had recorded record loads of 38,800 megawatts on the same day, the highest rate recorded in the history of the grid, according to what the holding company announced. This figure, which reflects unprecedented pressure on the energy system, brings back to the fore the problems of unregulated urban expansion, unrationalised central air-conditioning, and weak investment in the infrastructure of electricity transmission and distribution.
This comes at a time when citizens are already suffering from the return of repeated load-shedding, with no clarity about its timing and no transparency about its causes, as citizens from various areas in Cairo and Giza who spoke to “Zawia3” affirm that the outages have become part of their daily routine, and often happen at peak times without prior warning, which disrupts their affairs and increases their suffering amid rising temperatures. A number of residents in neighbourhoods such as Faisal, Haram and Basateen also point out that the absence of any announced load-shedding schedule makes it difficult to adapt to the situation, while others note that the sudden outages have damaged electrical appliances and caused material losses.
For its part, Giza Governorate said, at dawn today, Monday, that it had finished repairing the high-voltage cable (66 kV) in the Saqiyet Mekki area of the South Giza district, noting that electricity had begun to be pumped gradually to the affected areas, including vital and public facilities, in parallel with the regular restart of the Gezirat El-Dahab water station, with the aim of restoring the normal pumping of water to the affected areas. The governorate apologised to citizens for any inconvenience or suffering caused by the power cut or the disruption of water services, affirming its keenness to take all urgent measures to ensure the stability of services as soon as possible.
Since 2023, Egypt has faced repeated power cuts, often because of fuel shortages, declining gas production and rising demand during heatwaves. Last April, the government announced that full preparations had been made to avoid power cuts during the summer, including importing fuel and strengthening the grid. With no announced plans to make up for the energy shortage or improve distribution efficiency, the crisis appears set to continue unless it is treated as a service and security priority at the same time, according to observers who spoke to Zawia3.
A Recurring Scene
In the streets of Haram, Faisal and Gezirat El-Dahab, the same scene has been repeated since the start of this week: citizens trapped between darkness and heat, trying to adapt to repeated power cuts lasting for hours, with no clear schedule or advance warnings. “Life has come to be run by the minute,” says Fatma Abdel Moneim, a housewife from El-Labini Street, adding: “We calculate when the power will come on so that we can charge our phones or run the fridge a little, then we wait for hours in the darkness and the heat.”
Fatma, who supports a family of four, affirms that the power often goes off without prior warning, followed by an immediate water cut, as the building she lives in depends on an electric pump. She says that she was forced to buy candles and batteries despite her hard circumstances, and complains of the absence of any response from the electricity company, asking: “Is there anyone who hears about our conditions? They say on the news that the electricity and water have come back, but the reality is no water, no electricity and no life.”
As for Yasser Allam, a private-sector employee who lives in the Faisal area, he went through an experience he described as “terrifying” when he was stuck in a lift for more than half an hour on his way back from work. He tells “Zawia3”: “I was banging on the walls and screaming until one of the neighbours heard me and helped rescue me.” Since then, Yasser has refrained from using the lift, despite suffering from knee problems, and has been forced to climb six floors on foot every day. Yasser criticises the absence of warnings or of any communication from the authorities concerned, affirming: “People must know and get ready, instead of us being locked in as if we were in a trap.”
In Gezirat El-Dahab, the suffering grows more acute among more vulnerable groups, and with weak infrastructure. Rania Mohsen, a cleaner who lives with her elderly mother in a cramped room without ventilation, says that her mother was unable to sleep all night because of the heat. “The small fan we rely on did not work, and the water was cut too. We knocked on the neighbours’ doors, but they were in the same situation,” she adds sorrowfully, before asking: “No one contacts us, neither MPs nor officials, and we do not know when life will return to normal. My mother is ill and at risk of a drop in blood pressure at any moment; who is responsible for her life?”
The consequences of the crisis go beyond homes to reach vital facilities. In a kidney dialysis unit belonging to one of the medical centres in Giza, Dr Hossam Kamal recounts to Zawia3 the details of a day he described as “critical medically and humanly”. He says: “The power went off suddenly on Saturday, and the backup generator did not work because of an undetected fault; we were forced to postpone the sessions despite the presence of critical cases.” He affirms that some patients suffered complications because of the delay, noting that they received calls from other centres asking for help, and warns: “If medical facilities are not placed among the national priorities for protecting the electricity grid, we will face a real humanitarian disaster.”
Parliament Enters the Crisis
MP Dr Maha Abdel Nasser criticises what she described as poor management of the crisis, and says in a statement to Zawia3 that the crisis of electricity and water cuts that wide areas recently witnessed is not merely a passing malfunction or an emergency crisis, but reveals a deeper crisis related to the absence of the bare minimum of the foundations of sound management of vital infrastructure in Egypt. She adds: “What is happening is not a coincidence. We live in a state that lacks a culture of periodic maintenance and advance planning. Facilities are left to operate until they collapse, without any pre-emptive intervention, and without providing spare parts or preparing alternatives to deal with breakdowns.”
Maha criticises the way crises are managed, noting that what happened at the Giza power station recently, and the breakdowns that preceded it in vital places such as the Ramses telephone exchange, reflect a complete absence of a scientific approach to dealing with public utilities. She says: “We manage files in a haphazard way. There is no system that monitors the technical condition of the stations, and there are no alternative plans ready to be implemented in the event of emergency breakdowns, and the result is that the citizen is the one who pays the price, in suffering, outages and the absence of any communication or transparency.”
The MP stresses that the continuation of this pattern of management means the continuation of failure, adding: “If the state’s philosophy in managing infrastructure does not change, and if an approach based on periodic maintenance, continuous assessment and the provision of alternatives is not adopted, there will be no improvement. We cannot keep waiting for disaster to happen and then move haphazardly.” She affirms that what is happening is not an inevitable fate, but a direct result of the absence of planning and of poor management, demanding that the government shoulder its responsibility before the crisis expands and turns into a comprehensive threat to human security in the country.
Parliament has seen movement in response to the crisis in recent days. For his part, MP Hisham Hussein, member of the House of Representatives for the Hawamdeya and Badrashin constituency, submitted an urgent parliamentary question to the ministers of electricity and local development, demanding the disclosure of the details of what happened and the accountability of those responsible for the power cut that lasted more than 12 hours without prior announcement or an alternative plan to supply the affected areas. In his intervention, the MP criticised the failure to activate emergency plans and the lack of coordination between the governorate’s agencies and the electricity companies, despite the recurrence of such crises over the past years.
Public reactions were no less sharp, as social media pages turned into platforms for collective complaints, in which citizens documented the scale of the suffering endured by families during the long outage, especially as the crisis coincided with extremely high temperatures. Some circulated pictures of medical devices that stopped working inside homes, and of air conditioners that broke down in children’s nurseries or patients’ rooms, while others posted clips documenting how residential lifts turned into “iron traps” in which residents were stuck for more than an hour.
Given this reality, the ministry has not yet put forward any clear plan to reassess the efficiency of transformer stations or to invest in alternative energy sources to meet the growing demand, which raises legitimate questions about whether the government is dealing with the electricity crisis as an “emergency event” or as a “strategic file” that requires a comprehensive review covering infrastructure, operating mechanisms and investment priorities.
What Are the Causes of the Crisis?
Egypt faces a structural crisis in the production of natural gas, which is the main fuel for electricity generation, as production has fallen considerably over the past two years, hitting its lowest level in nine years in February 2025, so that it fell short of meeting the sharply growing domestic demand, according to several sources. On the other hand, the government indicated that the country faces sudden supply disruptions as a result of the halt of gas imports from Tel Aviv during June 2025 because of regional tensions, which put serious pressure on the electricity grid
It became clear that Egypt’s almost complete dependence on gas, which made up 84% of the energy mix in 2023, made it vulnerable to sudden outages at any disruption in supply, even one lasting only a few hours.
In 2023, natural gas made up 84% of the energy mix, while the share of renewable energy rose to 11.5% in 2024, with a large contribution from hydropower (7%) and solar and wind power (5%), according to the Low-Carbon Power website.
Engineer Mohamed Amin, deputy head of the Union Party, says in an exclusive statement to Zawia3 that the recurring crisis of electricity and water cuts is not only the result of emergency conditions or exceptional heatwaves, but is a direct reflection of poor strategic planning and resource management in recent years, particularly with regard to the unbalanced reliance on power stations that consume natural gas intensively, without any real development of renewable energy alternatives. He adds that the state expanded in building giant energy projects without investing sufficiently in the efficiency of distribution networks or in improving the institutional performance of the electricity companies, which is now appearing in the form of a daily deficit and compulsory supply cuts.
Amin points out that what is happening is not merely an incidental outage, but an expression of a structural flaw in the energy file as a whole: Egypt has a theoretical surplus in electricity production, but the problem lies in the limited fuel available to run the stations and the poor management of the distribution network, along with weak investment in maintenance operations. He says: “What is the use of stations if we cannot find what feeds them? And is it reasonable that the citizen should be left at the mercy of random load-shedding without transparency about the timetable or clear technical reasons?”
The deputy head of the Union Party criticises the lack of candour with citizens, explaining that the government did not clearly announce the crisis of the shortage of the domestic gas directed to the stations, and did not tell people frankly about the delay in imports of liquefied gas from abroad because of the dollar crises and the scarcity of hard currency. He also asks about the fate of the partnership contracts with private energy companies, which are supposed to help guarantee the stability of supplies.
Amin notes that the electricity crisis has extended to negatively affect drinking water stations, particularly on the outskirts of the new cities and in rural areas, where these stations stop working when the power is cut, which aggravates the suffering of residents who face two simultaneous cuts in basic services. He concludes his statement, saying: “We need a radical review of energy policies, based on transparency and long-term planning, and on linking national security to the concept of justice in the distribution of resources, instead of making the citizen bear the cost of accumulated failures on which he was never consulted in the first place.”
Although the government has affirmed that it has provided alternative plans to deal with the crisis, especially in light of the record rises in temperature, the power cuts were in many cases not part of a studied plan, but came as a result of unprecedented loads that peaked in summer 2025 at about 38,800 megawatts in a single day, the highest in the history of the national grid. The government says that the crisis consisted in the pressure of the heavy use of air conditioners and the fluctuation of consumption in homes and factories, amid weak expansions in generation capacity and transmission investments, which deprived the system of the flexibility to cope with peak loads.
In addition to the pressures of fuel and loads, the crisis was aggravated by a number of major transformer stations going out of service for technical reasons, particularly the Gezirat El-Dahab station in Giza, which suffered repeated breakdowns in its 220 kV circuits and 66 kV voltage cables, leading to “voltage withdrawal” and power cuts in wide areas where the hours of outage grew to more than 24 hours
Statements by the Ministry of Electricity and the transmission company carried indications that these breakdowns came as a result of clear negligence in periodic maintenance, as three main stations went out of service in less than two weeks (Giza, Alexandria), as evidence of the fragility of the infrastructure and the limited emergency plans available
The modern water system, from lifting raw water from its sources, through treating it in purification plants, to pumping it through distribution networks, requires an almost complete dependence on electricity. Any power cut, even for limited periods, brings these vital operations to a halt, particularly in stations that do not have sufficient alternative power sources. According to data from the Holding Company for Water and Wastewater, more than 70% of water stations in Egypt depend on public electricity to operate.
Consequently, the repeated power cuts, whether planned within load-shedding programmes or resulting from breakdowns, directly affect the continuity of water pumping, particularly in elevated areas and upper floors, or in neighbourhoods that lack sufficient storage tanks. The situation is aggravated by the absence of advance announcement of the times of power cuts, which prevents residents or service agencies from preparing to secure alternatives.
The current water crisis is organically linked to the electricity crisis, as the vast majority of water lifting and pumping stations in Egypt depend on the national electricity grid, so that any power cut automatically leads to the water service stopping in a large number of areas. Unofficial estimates indicate that about 60% of the stations do not have sufficient backup power sources to cover the hours of outage.
With the continuous rationing of electricity as a result of load-shedding, water stations have become liable to stop periodically, without the Holding Company for Water and Wastewater issuing precise schedules or pre-emptive statements to citizens so that they can arrange their needs. This situation reinforces the lack of transparency and deepens citizens’ sense of helplessness and institutional neglect.
