Iran's economic crisis is deepening and Iranian authorities have had to turn off the lights on Tehran's highways, an official told local media. This is against the backdrop of Iran's attempt to save as much fuel as possible.
"Right now, we have power outages on urban highways," said Alireza Rezai, a senior official at the Tehran Electric Company. Among other things, the crisis was caused by the sanctions imposed by the West on Iran over the years.
Recently, Iran closed schools, banks, and public institutions in several provinces for three consecutive days, due to worsening air pollution and critical energy shortages.
Many provinces are experiencing freezing temperatures and heavy snow, with the cold wave trapping the pollution in cities including the capital Tehran, which has been shrouded in a thick layer of smog. The successive increase in demand for heating has forced the government to resume power outages due to a worrying shortage of fuel.
Meanwhile, Iran International, Iran's opposition news website, reported today that in less than 24 hours since the head of the Central Bank promised to meet the country's foreign exchange needs, the price of each U.S. dollar on Tehran's open market reached 78,000 tomans on Wednesday morning. The morning after these statements, the dollar did not react very positively to the central bank governor's promises to cross the 78,000 tomans rate.
Iran, one of the world's leading energy powers, is in an unprecedented crisis: "In a very strange way, although Iran is an oil power, for the export of crude oil, it does not have enough refineries and enough resources to derive the necessary fuel and types of fuels from it," Benny Sabti, a researcher in the Iran Studies Department at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), explained to Maariv yesterday.
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