Karam Shaar Advisory Ltd., 'Obstacles and Opportunities for Syria's Electricity Sector', Syria in Figures, issue 4, January 2025
Source ID
SRC-324
Citation
Karam Shaar Advisory Ltd., 'Obstacles and Opportunities for Syria's Electricity Sector', Syria in Figures, issue 4, January 2025
URL or path
https://karamshaar.com/syria-in-figures/obstacles-and-opportunities-for-syrias-electricity-sector/; research/SRC-A2_KSA_obstacles_opportunities_electricity.html; text at research/SRC-A2_KSA_obstacles_opportunities_electricity.txt
Type
Specialist analytical publication
Hierarchy tier
4
Published
2025-01
Accessed
2026-08-22
Snapshot
Full HTML archived and converted to text 22 August 2026
Claims
Retrieval A2; the loss rate, the generation series and the capacity figures
Status
READ
Version history
The register keeps changing after the book is fixed in print. Each entry below was added to this row in the order shown.
RETRIEVED AND READ 22 AUGUST 2026. THIS IS THE DOCUMENT ISSUE 9 HYPERLINKS FOR SIX OF ITS LOAD-BEARING FIGURES, including 'lost', 'only a few hours', 'degraded', 'remain idle', 'collapsed' and 'inherited'. Opening it moves those figures from an analyst's summary to the analyst's own worked passage and names the publishers behind them. IT NAMES THE PUBLISHER OF THE GENERATION SERIES, VERBATIM: 'data from the Ministry of Electricity showed a 75% decrease in electricity output between 2011 and 2023, from 49,000 gigawatt-hours (GWh) in 2011 to 12,900 GWh in 2023.' SO 12,900 AND 49,000 ARE MINISTRY OF ELECTRICITY DATA AND THE BASE YEAR IS 2011, not 'before the conflict' at large. IT NAMES THE PUBLISHER OF THE LOSS RATE, AND THE DEFINITION FALSIFIES A DISTINCTION THE SOURCE MANUSCRIPT DRAWS. VERBATIM: 'of the electricity generated by the Ministry in 2023, a staggering 32% was lost in the network or self-consumed, per data from the Central Bureau of Statistics. This figure is nearly twice the 17% reported in 2010.' THE FIGURE IS 32 PER CENT, IT IS CENTRAL BUREAU OF STATISTICS DATA, AND IT COMBINES NETWORK LOSS WITH SELF-CONSUMPTION. Source Chapter 11 line 3179 says losses 'run to more than 30 per cent of everything it carries' and then insists that this be 'kept distinct from a second and much smaller number that circulates alongside it: the 5 to 6 per cent of output that generating plants consume internally, which is a different quantity measured at a different point, and confusing the two understates the network problem by a factor of five'. THE DISTINCTION IS DRAWN AGAINST A FIGURE THAT ALREADY COMBINES BOTH. The manuscript warns against a conflation while using the conflated number. This is a blocking-class correction for any Chapter 8 sentence carrying the loss rate, and the honest form names the 32 per cent, its publisher, its year, and that it is network loss plus self-consumption together. CAPACITY, AND THE PUBLISHER FLAGS ITS OWN AMBIGUITY: 'Former Minister of Electricity Ghassan al-Zamel had stated in March 2024 that the electricity sector had a current capacity of 2,200 megawatts (MW), about one-fifth of the 10,000 MW of installed capacity. It is unclear whether Mr. Zamel referred to 2,200 MW as the current capacity of all functioning power plants in Syria, or only those supplied with fuel.' A third figure appears in the same passage: 'Syria's power capacity stands at 3,500 MW.' So the capacity figures in circulation are 2,200, 3,500, 1,600 (issue 9), 6,200 and 7,159 (the 2005 national communication at SRC-319) and 10,000 or 9,500 installed. INSTALLED AGAINST AVAILABLE IS THE DISTINCTION AND NOBODY STATES IT CONSISTENTLY. A SECTOR COST FIGURE, WHICH RF-003 SHOULD BE READ AGAINST: 'According to newly-appointed Caretaker Government (CG) Minister of Electricity Omar Shaqrouq, the cost of repairing the electricity sector is roughly $40 billion.' That is a ministerial statement, not an assessment. It sits beside issue 9's USD 1.5 billion for the grid on unpublished government figures, and beside a third figure this gate records as retrieval owed, a headline in The National reading 'Syria seeks $30bn for energy sector rehabilitation'. THREE DIFFERENT ENERGY COST FIGURES OF THREE DIFFERENT SCOPES, and RF-003's status NO_SECTOR_COST_PUBLISHED remains correct because none is a published assessment. THE FUEL REQUIREMENT DISAGREES WITH ISSUE 9 BY A FACTOR OF TWO: 'In July 2024, Mr. Zamel highlighted that Syria had managed to secure only 6.5 million of the 23 million cubic meters of gas needed daily, and only 4,500 of the 10,000 tonnes of fuel required.' Issue 9 reports the March 2025 caretaker minister requiring 23 million cubic metres and 5,000 TONNES of fuel oil. The gas requirement is identical at 23 million; the fuel requirement is 10,000 tonnes in July 2024 and 5,000 in March 2025. Two ministers, eight months apart, differing by a factor of two on the same quantity, and neither the manuscript nor the architecture note carries the earlier figure.