Three Blackouts in a Fortnight: Georgia's Grid Is Telling You What Its Politics Won't

A power grid that collapses once is an accident. Twice is a warning. Three times in fifteen days is a policy — someone has decided that the cost of preventing the next blackout is higher than the cost of absorbing it, and that someone works for Irakli Kobakhidze.

On the evening of August 5, Georgia went dark again. It was the third nationwide outage since late July. The Interior Ministry issued its usual reassurances; the transmission operator will, in due course, produce a report with the word "cascading" in it. But the interesting question has nothing to do with the substation that tripped. The interesting question is why a European candidate country with a functioning economy, a Black Sea coast, and two decades of donor investment in critical infrastructure now switches off with the regularity of a Soviet suburb in February.

Georgia's grid was rebuilt largely on external money after 2003. The hardware is not the problem. The problem is what the hardware has been asked to do over the last three years, and by whom. Since the ruling party pivoted its economic model toward absorbing whatever Russian capital, tourism and re-export flow arrived after 2022, electricity demand has done things the network was never dimensioned for. Data centres for crypto operators pushed out of Kazakhstan. Aluminium and cement pulled from sanctioned supply chains. Summer tourist load in Batumi that now behaves like an industrial customer. The state's own numbers, when it publishes them, show consumption growing faster than transmission upgrades.

This was a bet. The bet was that the arbitrage — sanctions arbitrage, re-export arbitrage, energy arbitrage — would generate enough revenue to pay for the grid it was overloading, and that the bill would arrive after the next election rather than before it. The bet has now been called, on a Tuesday evening, in the dark.

What makes the third blackout politically expensive rather than merely embarrassing is what happened in the same news cycle. László Róbert Mézes, a Hungarian journalist who has covered the anti-government protests for years from inside Tbilisi, was picked up by migration officers on the same day the lights went out. The United National Movement, gathering in congress, elected an interim governing council under Irakli Pavlenishvili and produced the sort of communiqué that oppositions produce when they sense the ground is finally moving. None of these three things caused the others. All three are legible as the same story: a government that has decided the friction of running the country is now higher than the friction of narrowing it.

The muscle memory here goes back further than the current cabinet. Georgian governments have, since independence, tended to treat infrastructure as a political asset — something to be delivered visibly before a vote and left to depreciate quietly after one. What has changed under Kobakhidze is the composition of the demand curve. The customers whose consumption is now stressing the transmission network are, disproportionately, the customers whose presence in Georgia is the ruling party's economic thesis. You cannot lecture a Russian-owned data centre about load-shedding when its arrival was, six months ago, filed under "foreign direct investment."