Tunisia is running out of options to fix its broken energy system. The national energy deficit now sits at a massive 3.8 billion dollars. That single number accounts for roughly 51 percent of the entire country's trade deficit. Every year since 2000, this gap has widened as domestic production drops and consumption climbs. Right now, Tunisia relies on Algeria for about 60 percent of its natural gas needs. It's a fragile arrangement. Recent global conflicts and shifting geopolitical alliances have proven that relying on foreign energy markets is a dangerous game.
To solve this, the Tunisian parliament approved five major solar concessions. The official goal is to force renewable energy to hit 35 percent of the national mix by 2030. It sounds great on paper. Politicians and international lenders love talking about it. But the strategy is facing massive resistance on the ground.
The pushback isn't coming from climate change deniers or people who love fossil fuels. It's coming from labor unions, local communities, and energy experts who see these contracts for what they really are. This isn't a transition to clean energy. It's the privatization of public assets wrapped in a green banner.
The Corporate Takeover of Tunisian Sunshine
The current policy direction shifts electricity production from the public sector to foreign corporations. When the government signs these solar concessions, they give multinational companies the right to harvest Tunisian sunlight, generate power, and sell it back to the state at guaranteed prices.
This structure relies on Power Purchase Agreements that last for decades. These agreements often include take-or-pay clauses. This means the Tunisian state must pay for the electricity these private plants produce, whether the national grid can handle it or not. If the grid suffers a bottleneck, the public utility still shells out cash to foreign investors.
It is a sweet deal for international consortia but a terrible bargain for the public. The foreign corporations take zero market risk. They get guaranteed revenues backed by international arbitration clauses. Meanwhile, the state-owned utility, the Tunisian Company of Electricity and Gas, assumes all the financial strain. The public pays for the grid infrastructure upgrades while private entities extract the profits.
This model treats energy as a simple commodity rather than a public good. When you privatize the generation of the cheapest power source available, you cripple the public utility's ability to cross-subsidize low-income households. The high-margin business goes to private entities, and the loss-making public service remains with the state.
Why the National Utility Is Getting Squeezed Out
The Electricity and Gas Federation has already organized major strikes against this corporate model. Workers aren't blind to what is happening. They see a systematic attempt to reduce the national utility to a mere grid operator.
For decades, the public utility managed everything from production to distribution. It kept electricity prices relatively stable for ordinary citizens despite global market shocks. Under the new strategy, the utility loses its monopoly on production. It gets forced to buy power from private developers who often export the carbon credits associated with these green projects to Europe.
Last year, the union explicitly protested this transfer of carbon credits. When private developers retain ownership of carbon credits, Tunisia loses the domestic environmental benefit of the transition. The clean energy gets credited to European companies trying to offset their pollution, while Tunisia remains stuck with the reputational and physical burdens of a dirty domestic energy mix.
The public utility faces a severe financial squeeze. It operates at a significant loss because the government caps consumer electricity rates to prevent widespread social unrest. Yet, the utility must buy fuel at international prices and now must service contracts with private solar providers. This path leads straight to intentional bankruptcy, which will then be used as an excuse to privatize the entire distribution network.
The Illusion of Technology Transfer
Proponents of these foreign concessions claim they bring valuable industrial knowledge and high-tech manufacturing to North Africa. That claim is false.
Take a close look at the assembly of these major solar projects. The photovoltaic panels are manufactured in China. The specialized inverters come from Europe. The engineering and design work happens in corporate headquarters outside of Africa. The actual work left for Tunisians is minimal. Local workers clear the land, dig the trenches, mount the racks, and secure the perimeter fencing.
These are temporary, low-wage construction jobs that disappear the moment the project goes online. A 100-megawatt solar plant requires hundreds of workers during a brief construction phase, but it needs fewer than two dozen people to run it once it operates. Those permanent roles are heavily skewed toward high-level foreign technicians, leaving locals with basic security and cleaning tasks.
There is no meaningful transfer of industrial capacity. Tunisia is not building a domestic solar panel manufacturing industry through these deals. It is not developing local patent pools or advanced research hubs. The country is simply providing land and sun while importing every piece of high-value equipment. It is a textbook extraction model, updated for the green economy.
The Green Colonialism Trap
Local resistance is deeply tied to the historical memory of resource exploitation. People living in the southern regions of Tunisia, where these massive solar farms are built, see a familiar pattern. Their lands are seized or leased under dubious terms, the resources are extracted, and the benefits flow directly to the capital or across the Mediterranean.
Regions like Tataouine and Kairouan suffer from chronic underdevelopment and high youth unemployment. When residents see thousands of hectares of land covered in solar arrays that export power out of their communities while their own neighborhoods face frequent summer blackouts, tension boils over. It creates a feeling of green colonialism.
This model replicates the old colonial trade structures. The global South provides cheap raw resources—in this case, land, space, and solar radiation—while the global North supplies the capital and technology, retaining the highest financial returns. Some planned projects even look at laying undersea cables directly to Europe to supply European consumers with green hydrogen and clean electricity, completely bypassing the needs of the Tunisian population.
True sovereignty means the people who live near the energy source benefit from it first. The current strategy does the exact opposite. It treats local communities as geographic obstacles that need to be managed rather than central participants in economic development.
Fixing the Energy Deficit Without Privatization
The government claims there is no alternative. They argue that the state budget cannot fund the billions of dollars needed to build renewable infrastructure. That argument ignores several structural solutions that do not involve surrendering public control.
Instead of subsidizing foreign solar developers, the state needs to redirect its capital toward upgrading the domestic refining capacity. The Tunisian Company of Petroleum Industries requires immediate investment to modernize its facilities. Improving local refining reduces the dependency on imported refined products, which are far more expensive than crude oil.
Tunisia also needs to focus heavily on the consumption side of the equation. A massive chunk of the energy deficit is driven by an inefficient transport sector and poorly insulated buildings. The state can achieve major energy savings by taking specific actions.
- Stop subsidizing private car ownership and freeze the expansion of car import licenses.
- Pour public funds into expanding the electric rail and bus networks across major cities like Tunis, Sfax, and Sousse.
- Implement a highly progressive tax on luxury, high-consumption vehicles to fund public transit.
- Mandate strict energy efficiency standards for all new residential and commercial construction.
These actions reduce the total demand for energy, which shrinks the deficit naturally without forcing the state to sign predatory contracts with foreign corporations.
Real Regional Cooperation
Breaking the dependency on Algerian gas doesn't mean Tunisia has to isolate itself or turn to Western multinationals. It means building balanced regional partnerships based on public utility cooperation rather than corporate exploitation.
North African nations have complementary energy profiles. Algeria has vast gas reserves and growing solar ambitions. Libya has oil. Tunisia has strategic geographic positioning and immense solar potential. Instead of competing against each other to sell cheap green energy to Europe, these countries should build a unified North African power grid managed by public entities.
A synchronized regional grid allows public utilities to balance their loads collectively. When Tunisia has a surplus of solar energy during the peak of the day, it can pipe that power to neighbors. When the sun sets, it can draw on regional gas or hydro assets without paying a premium to private brokers. This keeps the wealth within the public systems of the region.
Practical Next Steps for Tunisia
To reverse this slide toward corporate control, policy makers must change course immediately. The following steps provide a roadmap to a just energy transition.
First, pause the issuance of any new utility-scale solar concessions to foreign private entities. The government must audit the five contracts approved in April to ensure the public isn't locked into predatory pricing structures.
Second, rechannel international climate finance away from private project developers and directly into the public utility. Lenders like the World Bank must fund grid modernization through public mechanisms rather than forcing market liberalization as a condition for loans. The grid needs capital to handle intermittent solar power, and that capital should go to the state utility.
Third, democratize renewable energy by shifting the focus to small-scale, community-owned, and public rooftop solar. Instead of giant desert installations owned by foreign firms, the state should fund solar installations on every school, hospital, and public building. This creates local installation jobs, lowers public sector operating costs, and keeps control of production decentralized and local.
Fourth, pass strict legislation requiring a minimum of 60 percent local components and labor for any energy project built on Tunisian soil. If a company wants to build a wind or solar farm, they must source components from local factories, forcing the creation of a real domestic green manufacturing sector.
The energy transition is necessary because climate change is hitting North Africa hard. But a transition that bankrupts the public utility, creates no long-term local jobs, and transfers public wealth to foreign corporate boards will never succeed. It will face constant resistance because it fails the very people it is supposed to serve.
