When Lebanon’s electric grid all but collapsed in 2021, much of the country underwent a remarkable, unplanned transition to solar energy. But even though Lebanon’s example is an extreme case, it holds lessons for other places—including those with wealthy economies, like California—which are moving toward decentralized solar power as they come under strain from climate change, the weakening of state capacity, and conflict. In this Q&A with Century International fellow Zachary Cuyler, anthropologist Joanne Nucho discusses the limits of the solar transition underway in Lebanon and elsewhere, and the importance of comparing seemingly exceptional cases like Lebanon with distant places in both the global North and the global South. Note: This interview was conducted in late 2025, before the current Israeli war on Lebanon.
Zack Cuyler: How has the solar transition in Lebanon been similar to, or distinct from, transitions elsewhere in the world?
Joanne Nucho: The best way to answer that question is to distinguish between an energy transition to solar and energy access via solar. “Energy transition” means a shift to a new energy source, while “energy access” refers to getting energy to people who don’t have it. Lebanon is such an important case because there’s a transition taking place in a moment of rapid grid failure, so solar is both replacing old energy sources and filling the gap left by faltering access to state-provided electricity. But Lebanon is not exceptional: similar dynamics are underway elsewhere in the world and, as I argue in my forthcoming book, are even comparable to certain trends in advanced economies like California.
Lebanon’s grid was failing for many years, and eventually collapsed. Its solar transition happened as a result of local individual or collective solutions to this collapse that involved a rush to solar paired with battery systems. Of course, our conversation is taking place within a context where Israeli bombardment of civilians and civilian infrastructure is ongoing; we really cannot think about infrastructure in Lebanon outside of that context.
The global energy access market tends to focus on places where the grid was never fully extended—the “ungridded world” where expectations of centralized national grids are simply off the table. But Lebanon’s situation—what I call the “post-grid”—is conceptually different: there is a grid, but it doesn’t work.
Zack: Does Lebanon’s experience help us understand solar transitions taking place in other parts of the world?
Joanne: Take the case of California, where transmission lines of large public–private utilities have repeatedly sparked fires. The utility companies have to constantly shut off power in windy, dry weather as a preventative measure, so even when there aren’t fires, the grid isn’t really working. Proponents of solar energy in California have promoted solar as a decentralized solution to grid vulnerability, and solar has surged in the last decade from some 7 percent of generation to more than 33 percent. Rooftop solar installations in California also increasingly have battery storage to maintain electricity during blackouts, which are getting more frequent.
What’s similar across Lebanon and California is that individuals are adopting solar and batteries to opt out of a failing system. But whereas in Lebanon this occurred largely out of necessity, in California it also has an ideological motivation. Sellers of solar in California often mobilize a libertarian fantasy of everyone going it alone and doing it themselves. This approach resonates in the global energy access industry, which promotes “leapfrogging” over the grid by bringing solar to places that have no history of grid connection.
But wherever you are, remaking energy systems is a supremely political project—whether the grid is understood as something to leapfrog over, or is collapsing due to institutional failure or forces like climate change that are ostensibly beyond human control.
Zack: What political projects do these approaches to solar advance?
In the case of California, there are some built-in contradictions when it comes to the ideology around solar. The localist approach appears to be socially progressive and green-oriented. Some of the transition to solar is linked to an idea of retreating from the state and doing it yourself, and the “back to the land” idea of the 1970s Northern California counterculture. Some of the places that first developed small off-grid solar in California in the early 1980s were growing cannabis—which was not legal at the time—in remote areas, and therefore needed to be off the grid and self-sufficient.
At the same time, in California there is a longstanding allergy to big, centralized energy infrastructures, and promotion of deregulation and market-based solutions. Big utilities like PG&E—which are private but regulated by the state—have dominated California since the New Deal. These big, centralized, regulated monopolies have received a lot of criticism, on the basis that they held too much concentrated power and had captured their regulators. This critique resonated with a “small is beautiful” ethos shared by a lot of people, from cannabis farmers to Silicon Valley.
In 1992, Congress passed the Energy Policy Act, which allowed states to deregulate their energy markets to introduce competition. But this enabled companies like Enron, which had little public accountability and artificially created shortages and brownouts as part of a fraud-driven effort to juice their stock prices, to operate in California. When Enron went bankrupt in 2001, this did not raise the question of whether private, for-profit power provision (rather than scale or centralization) had been the problem all along. Even today, there seems to be a consensus preference among policymakers and energy providers for markets and decentralization, with the same localist, “small is beautiful” ethos.
A lot of the green nongovernmental organization (NGO) and global energy access world is also very attached to small, hyper-local solutions and has ideological preferences for decentralized systems, which they regard as more democratic. As I explained in Everyday Sectarianism in Urban Lebanon (2016)—my first book on electricity (and other infrastructures and services) and sectarianism in Lebanon—a lot of development organizations fetishize and valorize the local, treating the “community” as the source of knowledge. But the community can also be exclusionary or violent. The concept of a gated community, which is a very California thing, helped me to understand how localized forms of jurisdiction are so connected to infrastructure and service provisioning in Lebanon, where urban planning is totally constrained by who lives where. Small isn’t always beautiful.
Zack: What are some of the issues with decentralized solar energy and the localist ethos that appeals to such a diverse array of people, from California cannabis farmers and green NGOs to Silicon Valley venture capitalists?
Joanne: While local solar adoption may provide autonomy and resilience, it scales both power provision and finance to the level of the individual household in a way that benefits those who already have resources. Those who don’t already have resources have to take on debt to adopt solar, making their lives more precarious and vulnerable. That’s true whether you’re talking about California, Lebanon, or “un-gridded” parts of Africa.
Projects financed by household debt build different things than ratepayer-financed utilities. Household debt-based financing lends itself to projects that are smaller, with a shorter-term return on investment for the companies, and are meant to scale up across multiple consumers. The key is that individual debt is what grows these markets, and by definition, these new forms of financing bypass the state and centralized planning.
In Lebanon, people procured solar systems differently: through family remittances, individual savings, and pooling resources between apartments. There are a lot of reasons for this, including the financial collapse and Israel’s ongoing attacks on Lebanon’s civilian infrastructure. The outcome seems impressive—most of rural Lebanon is now solar. But again, we have to consider who this transition has excluded: the urban poor and those without access to remittances or the right political connections.
Consumer-debt-financed solar in California has had similar problems. For one, homeowners who can afford to buy their panels outright, rather than lease them, tend to reap greater financial benefits; and those who do tend to be white and more affluent. Less affluent homeowners lease their installations or take out sometimes predatory loans to get them. There were a number of high-profile fraud cases like a bungled (though well-meaning) program called PACE in Los Angeles County, where you could borrow against the value of your house to install solar panels and do green home improvements. People borrowed too much or paid too much—in some cases, they were tricked—and ended up paying back the debt through property tax assessments they couldn’t afford. Some people lost their homes. This especially affected low-income communities of color.
In East Africa, there are a lot of microfinanced, small solar projects that follow similar models to those we see in California, and in some cases are linked to U.S.-based firms. Here, Silicon Valley—with its very undemocratic fantasies about the future—and the more democratically minded NGO world converge in unexpected ways. Zola Electric, the second largest provider of electricity in Tanzania after the national grid, was actually funded by the same venture capital firm that funded SolarCity, which was then acquired by Tesla. It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that the pay-as-you-go solar leasing model that Zola and other firms used in East Africa has led to similar problems of high debt burden in that region, and accusations that Zola is preying on the poor. Private capital is pushing for market-based solutions to energy access around the world, so as researchers, our analysis also needs to be comparative and global in scope.
To be clear, not all localization efforts are about free markets and deregulation, and not all of them are predatory or exclusionary. There are truly vital and important small-scale solar and energy projects in California, including tribal energy projects that are all about tribal sovereignty and ownership of the infrastructure. There are also rural energy resilience projects in fire-prone or earthquake-prone parts of California, in which small energy systems play an important role, which I discuss in my new book.
Zack: It seems like a lot of these problems with local, decentralized solar arise from not treating energy as a right.
Yes. It’s akin to the Obamacare-versus-Medicare-For-All debate. Obamacare improved access to health insurance for millions of Americans, but it is still a market-based solution for a society-level problem that universal health care could more equitably and comprehensively solve. When you treat energy as a right rather than simply a product you want to broaden access to, it casts a very different light on gaps in provision.
This brings us back to the question of utility-scale power. Public utilities, because they’re centralized, at least have the ability to plan, and can at least hypothetically guarantee electricity as a universal right, though I can think of examples even within the United States where that did not happen. They can do this because of who owns them—the public—and how they are financed, which is based around the expectation of a large number of guaranteed ratepayers that ideally grows over time.
If you want democracy, you need public things, collective goods, that make you mutually interdependent with other people. A grid—even a small or decentralized grid—can do this, because if it fails, it brings down everyone on the grid together. People using a grid don’t even have to like each other, but they know that they have this shared system that they need to negotiate around and figure out how to sustain. That is the very possibility of a democratic politics, whether in Lebanon or California or anywhere else.
Zack: Are there models of how to capture the benefits of the Lebanese solar transition for the public good? Lebanon’s situation seems especially tricky because the national government is so dysfunctional.
Joanne: This is another opportunity to learn across geographies. Municipalization is one remedy that has some precedent in California. Some early municipal power utilities in Southern California had their origins as small private utilities owned by Henry E. Huntington, a railroad and real estate mogul, in the early twentieth century.
One could imagine some of the private solar microgrids in Lebanon undergoing a similar process. But municipalization isn’t a panacea—in Lebanon, for example, it would still leave plenty of people on the failing national grid and left out of exclusionary private grids. The overall point, though, is that there are policies that can institutionalize local benefits, connect these local efforts to the state, and avoid the nightmare scenario of gated communities and individualized energy islands that encourage hoarding and exclusion.
Zack: It sounds like even in places where decentralization makes sense, at the end of the day, you need solidarity and you need the state.
Joanne: Yes, you do. I’m not opposed to decentralization. I have seen incredible microgrid projects succeed, especially in California, in places where communities were isolated, had fragile grid access, and had inequities that these microgrid projects could address. It’s not a choice between centralization and decentralization; you need coordination between centralized and decentralized approaches.
This Q&A is part of “Networks of Power,” a project led by Century International fellow Zachary Cuyler, which aims to map Lebanon’s evolving energy sector and assess the prospects for energy justice.
Tags: lebanon, renewable energy, solar energy
Q&A: Decentralized Lebanese Solar Has Lessons for the World—Including the United States
When Lebanon’s electric grid all but collapsed in 2021, much of the country underwent a remarkable, unplanned transition to solar energy. But even though Lebanon’s example is an extreme case, it holds lessons for other places—including those with wealthy economies, like California—which are moving toward decentralized solar power as they come under strain from climate change, the weakening of state capacity, and conflict. In this Q&A with Century International fellow Zachary Cuyler, anthropologist Joanne Nucho discusses the limits of the solar transition underway in Lebanon and elsewhere, and the importance of comparing seemingly exceptional cases like Lebanon with distant places in both the global North and the global South. Note: This interview was conducted in late 2025, before the current Israeli war on Lebanon.
Zack Cuyler: How has the solar transition in Lebanon been similar to, or distinct from, transitions elsewhere in the world?
Joanne Nucho: The best way to answer that question is to distinguish between an energy transition to solar and energy access via solar. “Energy transition” means a shift to a new energy source, while “energy access” refers to getting energy to people who don’t have it. Lebanon is such an important case because there’s a transition taking place in a moment of rapid grid failure, so solar is both replacing old energy sources and filling the gap left by faltering access to state-provided electricity. But Lebanon is not exceptional: similar dynamics are underway elsewhere in the world and, as I argue in my forthcoming book, are even comparable to certain trends in advanced economies like California.
Lebanon’s grid was failing for many years, and eventually collapsed. Its solar transition happened as a result of local individual or collective solutions to this collapse that involved a rush to solar paired with battery systems. Of course, our conversation is taking place within a context where Israeli bombardment of civilians and civilian infrastructure is ongoing; we really cannot think about infrastructure in Lebanon outside of that context.
The global energy access market tends to focus on places where the grid was never fully extended—the “ungridded world” where expectations of centralized national grids are simply off the table. But Lebanon’s situation—what I call the “post-grid”—is conceptually different: there is a grid, but it doesn’t work.
Zack: Does Lebanon’s experience help us understand solar transitions taking place in other parts of the world?
Joanne: Take the case of California, where transmission lines of large public–private utilities have repeatedly sparked fires. The utility companies have to constantly shut off power in windy, dry weather as a preventative measure, so even when there aren’t fires, the grid isn’t really working. Proponents of solar energy in California have promoted solar as a decentralized solution to grid vulnerability, and solar has surged in the last decade from some 7 percent of generation to more than 33 percent. Rooftop solar installations in California also increasingly have battery storage to maintain electricity during blackouts, which are getting more frequent.
What’s similar across Lebanon and California is that individuals are adopting solar and batteries to opt out of a failing system. But whereas in Lebanon this occurred largely out of necessity, in California it also has an ideological motivation. Sellers of solar in California often mobilize a libertarian fantasy of everyone going it alone and doing it themselves. This approach resonates in the global energy access industry, which promotes “leapfrogging” over the grid by bringing solar to places that have no history of grid connection.
But wherever you are, remaking energy systems is a supremely political project—whether the grid is understood as something to leapfrog over, or is collapsing due to institutional failure or forces like climate change that are ostensibly beyond human control.
Zack: What political projects do these approaches to solar advance?
In the case of California, there are some built-in contradictions when it comes to the ideology around solar. The localist approach appears to be socially progressive and green-oriented. Some of the transition to solar is linked to an idea of retreating from the state and doing it yourself, and the “back to the land” idea of the 1970s Northern California counterculture. Some of the places that first developed small off-grid solar in California in the early 1980s were growing cannabis—which was not legal at the time—in remote areas, and therefore needed to be off the grid and self-sufficient.
At the same time, in California there is a longstanding allergy to big, centralized energy infrastructures, and promotion of deregulation and market-based solutions. Big utilities like PG&E—which are private but regulated by the state—have dominated California since the New Deal. These big, centralized, regulated monopolies have received a lot of criticism, on the basis that they held too much concentrated power and had captured their regulators. This critique resonated with a “small is beautiful” ethos shared by a lot of people, from cannabis farmers to Silicon Valley.
In 1992, Congress passed the Energy Policy Act, which allowed states to deregulate their energy markets to introduce competition. But this enabled companies like Enron, which had little public accountability and artificially created shortages and brownouts as part of a fraud-driven effort to juice their stock prices, to operate in California. When Enron went bankrupt in 2001, this did not raise the question of whether private, for-profit power provision (rather than scale or centralization) had been the problem all along. Even today, there seems to be a consensus preference among policymakers and energy providers for markets and decentralization, with the same localist, “small is beautiful” ethos.
A lot of the green nongovernmental organization (NGO) and global energy access world is also very attached to small, hyper-local solutions and has ideological preferences for decentralized systems, which they regard as more democratic. As I explained in Everyday Sectarianism in Urban Lebanon (2016)—my first book on electricity (and other infrastructures and services) and sectarianism in Lebanon—a lot of development organizations fetishize and valorize the local, treating the “community” as the source of knowledge. But the community can also be exclusionary or violent. The concept of a gated community, which is a very California thing, helped me to understand how localized forms of jurisdiction are so connected to infrastructure and service provisioning in Lebanon, where urban planning is totally constrained by who lives where. Small isn’t always beautiful.
Zack: What are some of the issues with decentralized solar energy and the localist ethos that appeals to such a diverse array of people, from California cannabis farmers and green NGOs to Silicon Valley venture capitalists?
Joanne: While local solar adoption may provide autonomy and resilience, it scales both power provision and finance to the level of the individual household in a way that benefits those who already have resources. Those who don’t already have resources have to take on debt to adopt solar, making their lives more precarious and vulnerable. That’s true whether you’re talking about California, Lebanon, or “un-gridded” parts of Africa.
Projects financed by household debt build different things than ratepayer-financed utilities. Household debt-based financing lends itself to projects that are smaller, with a shorter-term return on investment for the companies, and are meant to scale up across multiple consumers. The key is that individual debt is what grows these markets, and by definition, these new forms of financing bypass the state and centralized planning.
In Lebanon, people procured solar systems differently: through family remittances, individual savings, and pooling resources between apartments. There are a lot of reasons for this, including the financial collapse and Israel’s ongoing attacks on Lebanon’s civilian infrastructure. The outcome seems impressive—most of rural Lebanon is now solar. But again, we have to consider who this transition has excluded: the urban poor and those without access to remittances or the right political connections.
Consumer-debt-financed solar in California has had similar problems. For one, homeowners who can afford to buy their panels outright, rather than lease them, tend to reap greater financial benefits; and those who do tend to be white and more affluent. Less affluent homeowners lease their installations or take out sometimes predatory loans to get them. There were a number of high-profile fraud cases like a bungled (though well-meaning) program called PACE in Los Angeles County, where you could borrow against the value of your house to install solar panels and do green home improvements. People borrowed too much or paid too much—in some cases, they were tricked—and ended up paying back the debt through property tax assessments they couldn’t afford. Some people lost their homes. This especially affected low-income communities of color.
In East Africa, there are a lot of microfinanced, small solar projects that follow similar models to those we see in California, and in some cases are linked to U.S.-based firms. Here, Silicon Valley—with its very undemocratic fantasies about the future—and the more democratically minded NGO world converge in unexpected ways. Zola Electric, the second largest provider of electricity in Tanzania after the national grid, was actually funded by the same venture capital firm that funded SolarCity, which was then acquired by Tesla. It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that the pay-as-you-go solar leasing model that Zola and other firms used in East Africa has led to similar problems of high debt burden in that region, and accusations that Zola is preying on the poor. Private capital is pushing for market-based solutions to energy access around the world, so as researchers, our analysis also needs to be comparative and global in scope.
To be clear, not all localization efforts are about free markets and deregulation, and not all of them are predatory or exclusionary. There are truly vital and important small-scale solar and energy projects in California, including tribal energy projects that are all about tribal sovereignty and ownership of the infrastructure. There are also rural energy resilience projects in fire-prone or earthquake-prone parts of California, in which small energy systems play an important role, which I discuss in my new book.
Zack: It seems like a lot of these problems with local, decentralized solar arise from not treating energy as a right.
Yes. It’s akin to the Obamacare-versus-Medicare-For-All debate. Obamacare improved access to health insurance for millions of Americans, but it is still a market-based solution for a society-level problem that universal health care could more equitably and comprehensively solve. When you treat energy as a right rather than simply a product you want to broaden access to, it casts a very different light on gaps in provision.
This brings us back to the question of utility-scale power. Public utilities, because they’re centralized, at least have the ability to plan, and can at least hypothetically guarantee electricity as a universal right, though I can think of examples even within the United States where that did not happen. They can do this because of who owns them—the public—and how they are financed, which is based around the expectation of a large number of guaranteed ratepayers that ideally grows over time.
If you want democracy, you need public things, collective goods, that make you mutually interdependent with other people. A grid—even a small or decentralized grid—can do this, because if it fails, it brings down everyone on the grid together. People using a grid don’t even have to like each other, but they know that they have this shared system that they need to negotiate around and figure out how to sustain. That is the very possibility of a democratic politics, whether in Lebanon or California or anywhere else.
Zack: Are there models of how to capture the benefits of the Lebanese solar transition for the public good? Lebanon’s situation seems especially tricky because the national government is so dysfunctional.
Joanne: This is another opportunity to learn across geographies. Municipalization is one remedy that has some precedent in California. Some early municipal power utilities in Southern California had their origins as small private utilities owned by Henry E. Huntington, a railroad and real estate mogul, in the early twentieth century.
One could imagine some of the private solar microgrids in Lebanon undergoing a similar process. But municipalization isn’t a panacea—in Lebanon, for example, it would still leave plenty of people on the failing national grid and left out of exclusionary private grids. The overall point, though, is that there are policies that can institutionalize local benefits, connect these local efforts to the state, and avoid the nightmare scenario of gated communities and individualized energy islands that encourage hoarding and exclusion.
Zack: It sounds like even in places where decentralization makes sense, at the end of the day, you need solidarity and you need the state.
Joanne: Yes, you do. I’m not opposed to decentralization. I have seen incredible microgrid projects succeed, especially in California, in places where communities were isolated, had fragile grid access, and had inequities that these microgrid projects could address. It’s not a choice between centralization and decentralization; you need coordination between centralized and decentralized approaches.
This Q&A is part of “Networks of Power,” a project led by Century International fellow Zachary Cuyler, which aims to map Lebanon’s evolving energy sector and assess the prospects for energy justice.
Tags: lebanon, renewable energy, solar energy