Masoud Khani, director of energy efficiency projects at Iran’s Power Generation, Transmission, and Distribution Company (Tavanir), stated that the company has accumulated losses exceeding 1,850 trillion rials (approximately $2.2 billion) and outstanding debts of 2,000 trillion rials (around $2.38 billion).
On Wednesday, January 29, Khani further stated that over the past three years, both Tavanir and Iran’s electricity sector have been operating at a loss, with the company’s debts to power plants steadily increasing.
He noted that due to these mounting losses and debts, Tavanir is no longer able to invest in the construction of new power plants.
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His comments appear to be a response to statements made last week by Hassanali Taghizadeh Landeh, chairman of the board of the Power Producers Syndicate, who claimed that Tavanir’s revenue had increased 3.5 times over the past three years due to higher electricity tariffs. However, he alleged that “not a single rial of this increased revenue has been allocated to the development or construction of new power plants.”
In August 2024, Taghizadeh had also strongly criticized Tavanir, accusing the company of engaging in electricity brokerage rather than focusing on power production and distribution.
He stated that the Ministry of Energy currently buys electricity from private power plants at 1,200 rials per kilowatt-hour and then sells the same electricity on the Energy Exchange for over 18,000 rials per kilowatt-hour. The free-market exchange rate for the dollar is approximately 840,000 rials.
In his latest response to these claims, Khani did not deny the increase in Tavanir’s revenue but stated that the additional income is being used to pay off debts and cover past losses, leaving no surplus funds for building new power plants.
The admission by the Tavanir official regarding the government’s inability to build new power plants comes as Iran’s Minister of Energy, Abbas Ali-Abadi, claimed on Saturday, “Next summer, the country’s electricity supply situation will improve, and with the successful implementation of plans and cooperation from government agencies, we can expect to resolve the electricity imbalance by summer 2026.”
Iranian officials and media use the term “imbalance” to refer to the country’s energy shortage crisis.
Ali-Abadi’s optimism about improving the electricity shortage and even resolving the imbalance contradicts his own statement a month ago when he admitted that the country faced a 20,000-megawatt electricity shortfall this summer, a figure expected to peak at 25,000 megawatts next year.
Iran’s electricity shortfall during peak summer consumption in 2023 was about 12,000 megawatts. This summer, it surged to 20,000 megawatts, and next year, it is expected to reach 25,000 megawatts. Addressing this deficit would require at least $20 billion in investment.
While Iran’s electricity consumption grows by 7% annually, electricity production has increased by less than half that rate over the past decade. Last year, power generation in the country grew by only 2%.
Tavanir has restricted public access to its monthly statistics, making it unclear how power plant development projects have progressed this year.
