The power goes out when you need it most.

A grid under pressure

SOMELEC — Mauritania's national electricity company — is the sole provider. It handles generation, transmission, and distribution. Its installed capacity is roughly 530 MW, 71% of which comes from thermal plants running on heavy fuel oil. The rest is a mix of solar, wind, and hydroelectricity imported from the Manantali dam via the OMVS.

Peak demand in Nouakchott grows 6–7% per year. That's faster than SOMELEC can invest. Every summer, AC demand spikes and the grid runs at its limits. When a single piece fails — a transformer, a transmission line, a generator — entire neighborhoods go dark.

The Rosso line

Nouakchott's grid depends on an interconnection with the OMVS — the Senegal River Basin Development Organization. The connection runs through a single 225 kV high-voltage line from Rosso to Nouakchott. That line carries Mauritania's share of electricity from the Manantali, Félou, and Gouina dams.

When it goes down — and it goes down regularly — the city loses a significant chunk of its supply in one shot. In March 2026, during Ramadan, a fault on this line blacked out Nouakchott and Nouadhibou after iftar. In 2017, a similar incident caused 3-hour outages in the middle of the night. In 2020, frequency disruptions on the OMVS network cut power for an entire Saturday.

This isn't rare. It's structural. The vulnerability is known, documented, and it shows up with predictable regularity — especially in summer, when demand is highest and the grid is most fragile.

What we can't measure

What we have is the lived experience of every Nouakchott resident. When heat peaks, the grid fails. That's not an opinion — it's a fact anyone in the city can confirm. We declare it as context, not as a measured variable. The distinction matters.

In La Taxe Canicule, we used the same approach for commercial AC penetration: "1 in 3 spaces is air-conditioned" — a declared local estimate, not a direct measurement. Same principle here. The blackouts exist. Their summer concentration is known. We don't pretend to quantify them.

AC as a class marker

In La Taxe Canicule, we calculated that Nouakchott's commercial sector spends roughly 869 million MRU per year just running AC — money paid to SOMELEC to survive the summer, not to turn a profit.

But that calculation assumes the power is on. When the grid fails, the AC stops. And that's where the class divide cuts deepest: those with money have a backup generator. Those without are in the same position as people who never had AC to begin with — they take the night as it comes.