Tunisia is enduring one of its most severe heatwaves in recent memory, with temperatures approaching 49 degrees Celsius and rolling electricity blackouts stretching for up to six hours or more, pushing households, businesses and infrastructure to their limits. The state electricity and gas company, STEG, has been issuing daily alerts listing neighbourhoods scheduled for controlled outages — a measure officials say is necessary to prevent a total collapse of the national grid. Electricity demand may have reached a record six gigawatts on a single day this week, after already hitting 5.6 gigawatts only days earlier, driven largely by surging air conditioner use during the peak summer tourism season.

The outages, while not unprecedented in Tunisian summers, have this year spread far more widely across the country than before. In Tunis, the capital, a pastry shop employee described the situation starkly: "It feels like God has opened the gates of hell," as cakes sat melting in the dark and refrigerators fell silent. Some residents say they now avoid using elevators for fear of being trapped inside during a cut. President Kais Saied has called the repeated outages "abnormal" and warned that those responsible for the failures should be held accountable.

Experts point to a combination of structural vulnerabilities. Tunisia still relies heavily on natural gas to generate electricity, but declining domestic production has made the country more dependent on imports, while financial pressures have strained STEG's capacity. Hela Tlili, a renewable energy professor at Tunis El Manar University, describes an ageing grid that has not kept pace with rapidly growing demand: "Demand is growing much faster than production." Scientists broadly agree that human-driven climate change is making heatwaves longer, more intense and more frequent.

The economic toll is becoming visible. Employers' groups warn that the lack of predictable schedules for planned cuts makes it nearly impossible for companies to organise production. At one factory in a Tunis suburb, work reportedly ground to a halt for two days. Butchers and food retailers are raising alarms about damage to refrigeration equipment. Meanwhile, the poorest residents are left most exposed: one woman in the working-class suburb of Bhar Lazreg, north of Tunis, said she could not afford an air conditioner and resorted to sleeping on the floor to find relief, while her son slept with a frozen water bottle wrapped in a towel.

Tlili and other analysts argue that Tunisia's longer-term answer lies in urgently scaling up renewable energy — the country has significant solar and wind potential — but that this would require major public investment and what she calls "a change of paradigm" in energy policy. In the short term, humanitarian concerns are also mounting: health professionals have called on the president to consider early release for prisoners with chronic illnesses held in cells ill-equipped to handle extreme heat. With summers projected to grow hotter, the crisis is testing not only Tunisia's infrastructure but its broader social fabric.