This week, the lights went out in parts of Kuwait. Not because of the heat this time. Because of debris. Drones and missiles, intercepted overhead, falling back onto power lines. A few lines went down. Scattered areas went dark. The electricity ministry re-fed them from the grid and had the power back the same day.

Fine. I will excuse that one. A falling missile is not a maintenance schedule.

But strip away the war, and this is not new. The lights in Kuwait have been going out for years. Every summer. On time, like the heat.

Two summers ago, cuts hit more than forty areas while the temperature touched 52 degrees. Traffic lights died. People sat in stalled lifts. Last summer it started even earlier, in April, before summer had properly arrived, and reached fifty-one areas by mid-summer.

I have my own version. Last year we packed the car for the chalet. The kids, the bags, the whole production, a good weekend by the sea already planned in everyone’s head. We were on the road when the word reached us: no power where we were going. A chalet with no electricity, in that heat, is not a weekend. It is a hot box by the sea. So we turned around and drove home. We never even saw the water.

And this is not me complaining into the void. The official numbers say the same thing.

Twenty-one gigawatts. That is what Kuwait can make on paper. In peak summer, only seventeen of them actually work. Paper gigawatts do not cool houses.

Importing power. Kuwait buys electricity from its neighbours. Every month. All year. One of the largest oil producers on earth borrowing power to keep the air conditioning running.

The price. Citizens pay less than one cent per kilowatt hour. A tariff set in 1966. Nobody conserves because conserving saves nothing.

The plants. Old. Losing capacity every year. The fleet lost net capacity in 2024 while demand grew. Fifty-degree heat does not forgive aging infrastructure.

The build. Almost nothing new has been built in a decade. Projects are announced. Ministers are replaced. Parliaments are dissolved. The megawatts promised five years ago are still on paper.

The fuel. The moment a single plant trips, the fuel supply fails with it. One malfunction at one gas facility in 2024 shut down units at the two largest plants in the country.

The plan. There is always a plan. New plants. Solar. A deal with China. Fourteen thousand megawatts by 2031. But Kuwait’s plans have a pattern. They are announced with confidence and delivered with delay. The fifteen-hundred-megawatt solar plant they promised was cancelled. The renewables target will be missed by five years. On paper, Kuwait is always about to fix everything. On the ground, the lights go out every summer.

And the funniest part is what they ask us to do about it. Every summer, the same campaign. Save. Switch it off at noon. One of the largest oil producers on earth. Begging its own people to use less power.

Now, with all of that in mind, who on earth looked at this grid and decided Kuwait should host data centres for Google and Microsoft?

Both announced their intentions. Google in 2023, Microsoft in 2025. Neither has said how much power it would need. Neither has given a date. Neither has broken ground. So far it is two press releases and the word “intent.”

But here is the thing about a data centre. It never sleeps. It runs at full power, day and night, winter and summer, forever. The load of a small town of homes that never switch off. And Kuwait cannot keep the homes it already has cool for a single summer.

In any case, whatever happens with Kuwait’s grid, the lighthouse will be fine. The keeper’s lighthouse runs on one lamp. It never fails. Because someone maintains it. Every day. Without exception.