The year 2025 relates two facts that advance in parallel without yet meeting. On one hand, Tunisia added in twelve months more renewable power capacity than during the eight years from 2012 to 2020 combined, according to the capacity evolution curve. On the other hand, it has never depended so much on external sources to light, heat, and move.
The contrast is stark. The energy deficit reached 7.1 million tonnes of oil equivalent (Mtoe) excluding the gas levy, versus 6.2 in 2024. The energy independence rate has fallen to 35%, compared with 41% a year earlier, and it is only 27% if one does not count the gas tax relief as a national resource. The country was, however, in surplus in the 1970s and did not depend on foreign sources in 1990.
These findings come from the section devoted to renewable energy and energy efficiency in the 2025 Energy Annals, recently published by the Tunisian Association of Oil and Gas (ATPG). The work relies on data from the National Observatory of Energy and Mines (ONEM), the IEA, the National Statistics Institute (INS), and the World Bank. It is this source that allows reading the Tunisian transition as a sprint, rather than as a simple annual balance.
A race between two curves
The renewable park has grown from 116 MW in 2011 to 988 MW by the end of 2025, a multiplication of more than eightfold. For the just-past year, the gain is 261 MW, since the park stood at 727 MW in 2024. The share of renewables in primary energy consumption has almost doubled, from 2% to 3.7%, while it had been capped at 1.2% in 2023. In electricity production, hydropower, wind, and solar now account for 5.4%.
The problem is arithmetic. Per capita electricity consumption has risen to 1.6 MWh, up from 1.4 MWh in 2015, and energy dependence has climbed six percentage points in one year, from 59% to 65%. When demand grows as fast as the clean supply, the sun does not replace anything; it merely catches up.
The sun, tenant of four regimes
