In mid-May 2019 Reuters and other wires reported that Water and Electricity Minister Seleshi Bekele said Ethiopia had started rationing power for households and industry after low water at dams, especially Gibe 3, opened a deficit of roughly 476 megawatts.
Under a plan that was to run into July, homes faced hours of daily blackouts and heavy industries such as cement and steel had to cut shifts. Ethiopia also suspended electricity exports to Djibouti and Sudan that had been earning tens of millions of dollars a year.
The blackouts landed while officials still sold Ethiopia as a future African power exporter built on Nile hydropower. Rainfall and reservoir management, not only dam ceremonies, decided whether the lights stayed on.
As energy crisis archive, the rationing decision is a dated national checkpoint for later drought and FX stories that again tied factories to unreliable power.