TUNIS — This essay is an opinion piece by the editorial board of The Tunisian Times. The facts it rests on are sourced below; the judgments are our own.

Every summer the same quiet drama repeats. Air conditioners hum across the country, demand on the grid climbs toward its annual peak, and the national utility watches the gas meters — most of them fed, one way or another, from across the Algerian border. The lights mostly stay on. But the margin is thin, borrowed, and paid for in foreign currency the country does not have to spare.

How Tunisia arrived here is a sixty-year story worth telling honestly, because the way out depends on understanding the way in.

The inheritance: from exporter to dependent

Petroleum was discovered at El Borma, in the far south, in 1964 — a genuine bonanza for a young republic. For a generation, hydrocarbons paid bills: the field peaked in 1983, and Tunisia remained a net energy exporter until around 2000. That is the first thing to say plainly: the dependence is not ancient fate. It is recent, and it happened within living memory.

What happened is undramatic and cumulative. The old fields declined — El Borma has produced some 99 percent of its recoverable reserves — new discoveries were modest, demand grew with the middle class, and successive governments treated energy as a social good to be subsidized rather than a strategic sector to be rebuilt. By 2022, roughly half of the country's energy needs were imported. The energy deficit reached about 9 billion dinars in 2023 — the single largest wound in a chronically bleeding trade balance.

The present: one fuel, largely one supplier

Today the electrical system runs on natural gas — 94.9 percent of generation in 2025, still 91 percent by the end of May 2026. And the gas itself increasingly comes from one place: 63 percent purchased directly from Algeria, another 11 percent received as royalties on the Algerian gas transiting to Italy. Add the electricity Tunisia imports outright across the same border, and the arithmetic is stark: roughly three-quarters of the fuel behind a Tunisian light switch involves a single foreign supplier.

Let us be fair where fairness is due. Algeria has been a reliable partner, and buying pipeline gas from a neighbor is cheaper than most alternatives. STEG's engineers keep an aging system running under brutal summer peaks. And renewables, from a pitiful 4 percent of generation in 2025, have accelerated: installed green capacity reached 1.21 gigawatts by the end of last year, and clean sources supplied around 9 percent of generation by this spring.

But a fair accounting must also say this: for a country with some of the best solar irradiance on the Mediterranean, 9 percent is not an achievement. It is an indictment of two decades of hesitation — of tenders delayed, permitting tangled, a state utility financially too fragile to invest, and an energy debate conducted in slogans rather than megawatts.

The risks of doing nothing

The risks are not hypothetical. A single-supplier energy system is a foreign policy constraint as much as an economic one; no government negotiates freely with the hand that heats its homes. The subsidy bill and the import bill feed the very deficits that keep Tunisia locked in negotiations with lenders. Climate change raises summer demand while straining the water on which thermal plants and any future hydrogen industry would depend. And each year of delay locks in another year of gas contracts, another billion dinars that could have financed panels and grid lines instead.

The chances: what is finally moving

Yet this is also, for once, a moment of genuine opportunity — and it would be dishonest pessimism not to say so. The state has raised its renewable target from 30 to 35 percent of the power mix by 2030 and launched tenders for two gigawatts of new capacity, with investment plans on the order of 900 million dinars a year. The ELMED interconnector — a 600-megawatt submarine cable to Italy, financed by the EBRD and the World Bank, its major contracts awarded this June — will physically connect North African electrons to European markets by around 2028. For the first time, Tunisian sunshine has a potential export route.

The critics deserve a hearing too. Voices warning of "green colonialism" — of a Tunisia that exports clean electricity to Europe while its own grid strains — raise a legitimate question about who the transition is for, as Al Jazeera's recent commentary has argued. The answer, in our view, is not to reject the cable but to sequence the priorities: domestic supply first, export revenue second, and land and water rights negotiated transparently with the communities that host the projects.

What should happen now

The elements of a serious energy policy are not mysterious, and none of them are our invention — they are what the country's own 2050 self-sufficiency studies, the development banks and the sector's professionals have converged on. Execute the two-gigawatt tenders on schedule, and publish the timelines so delay has a political cost. Repair STEG's finances — no transition runs through a bankrupt utility — which means confronting, gradually and with protection for the poorest, a subsidy system that today rewards consumption over efficiency. Open the grid to distributed solar on factory roofs and farms, where projects are small, fast and Tunisian-owned. Use ELMED to earn hard currency, and earmark it for the grid. And treat energy efficiency — the cheapest kilowatt being the one never consumed — as the first resource, not an afterthought.

Tunisia spent its first sixty years of independence spending down a geological inheritance. The next inheritance is already overhead, free of charge, every day. The only question is how many more summers of gas-meter arithmetic the country is willing to endure before claiming it.