Sudan’s electricity sector has suffered losses estimated at $14 billion, with nearly 60 percent of the country’s power infrastructure destroyed during the war, the energy and mining minister in the de facto Port Sudan junta said.
Mutasim Ibrahim told Al Arabiya and Al Hadath that the damage to the national power grid was the result of deliberate and systematic attacks on vital facilities, including generation plants and transmission stations.
He said the Merowe Dam, Sudan’s largest hydroelectric facility, had been hit by nine drone attacks, while all major transformer stations across the country had also been targeted. The strikes, he said, severely weakened the state’s ability to generate and transmit electricity to many parts of the country.
Ibrahim said Sudan’s total electricity production capacity had fallen from around 2,500 megawatts before the war to about 1,900 megawatts today, after major generation facilities and national transmission networks were badly damaged across several states and localities.
The minister described the scale of destruction as “unprecedented” and said it reflected the strategic damage inflicted on the country’s electricity infrastructure.
He added that technical and engineering teams were working under difficult security conditions to assess the damage, carry out emergency repairs and restore damaged power lines in an effort to ease the suffering of civilians.
The minister also said Sudan is now fully dependent on imported petroleum products after the Khartoum refinery was knocked out of service and several oil fields stopped operating because of the worsening security situation.
The war has devastated basic services across Sudan. Damage to the electricity sector has caused prolonged power cuts in Khartoum and several other states, affecting water supplies, hospitals and economic activity, while millions of Sudanese continue to face a worsening humanitarian crisis.
