Iran’s Energy Minister Ali Akbar Mehrabian says the country has a deficit of about 15,000 megawatts in electricity production.

He announced the shortage in power production on the sidelines of a visit to a power plant construction project in the northeastern province of Razavi Khorasan on Thursday.

Mehrabian went on to say that 27 power plant units, generating about 4,500 megawatts of electricity, will enter the country’s grid this summer.

Mehrabian is in the province as part of a large delegation of ministers and officials accompanying President Ebrahim Raisi’s to his hometown, where they made a series of promises about different projects and measures to be realized this year.

According to recent data released by the ministry, power plants that were commissioned during the previous Iranian year (ended on March 20) only added a cumulative capacity of 965 megawatts to the supply network despite the announced target of adding 3,500 megawatts during the year.

Electricity consumption has been increasing in Iran because of extremely low prices, considered a subsidy in the state-controlled economy. Usage has reached to around 60,000 megawatt hours, while both power plant capacity and their fuel supply remains inadequate. At the same time, Iran exports electricity to Iraq while blackouts happen regularly at home.

Late in March, Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian reiterated “Iran's readiness to establish two 1,000-megawatt power stations in Lebanon”.