How Iranians suffer after US destroyed Iran's power grid
S. Massoud Amin
I have spent four decades keeping the lights on. After Sept.11, 2001, I directed security research and development for the electric utilities of North America. Everything I know rests on one conviction: A power grid is a life-support system, and defending it is defending the people who live on it.
Last month, my two countries — the U.S. and Iran — collided inside that conviction. The United States, where I have lived and built my life's work since 1978, began systematically destroying the power grid of Iran, where I was born.
An Iranian-born professional named Nakisa Farrokh Seresht described what that destruction feels like from inside a family. Her mother's electricity in Iran is now cut for two hours every day, she wrote on LinkedIn. Summer temperatures approach 45 degrees Celsius. Homes depend on air conditioning to survive the heat, and high-rise buildings depend on electric pumps to move water. When the power stops, cooling and water stop with it, and she ended with a sentence I have spent my career trying to teach: “Electricity is not a luxury; it is a basic human necessity.”
The scale behind her mother's two dark hours is documented. BBC Persian reported on July 18 that American strikes have damaged more than 2,000 points across Iran's electricity system — power plants, substations, transformers and transmission lines. Iranian officials say nearly 7,000 megawatts of generation capacity has been hit. Strikes on gas facilities have knocked out an estimated 20 to 25 percent of gas production, and gas fuels more than 80 percent of Iran's electricity. Scheduled two-hour blackouts stretch to four and six hours. Factories go dark for up to twelve hours at a time. Officials concede that some of the damage cannot be repaired this summer.
I know what those numbers mean because I have stood in control rooms during emergencies and watched operators fight, minute by minute, to hold a grid together. A grid is not a weapon. It moves water into apartments, keeps insulin and vaccines cold, runs ventilators and dialysis machines, and treats sewage before it reaches drinking supplies. Everyone lives downstream of the wire — the sick, the old and the very young most of all.
The law on this is not obscure, and the U.S. wrote much of it. The modern law of war began in this country: In 1863, Abraham Lincoln issued the Lieber Code, the first modern set of rules binding an army to protect civilians. The United States helped draft the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and ratified them. In 1977, it signed Additional Protocol I, whose Article 54 prohibits attacking “objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population” and names drinking water installations among them. Washington never ratified that protocol, but the Pentagon's own Law of War Manual accepts its core rules — the distinction between military and civilian objects and proportionality in attack — as customary law binding on American forces everywhere.
In Iran's cities, water moves by electric pump. An attack that cuts power to millions of homes cuts their water. The treaty does not require imagination. It requires reading.
We have done that reading recently — for others. When Russia struck Ukraine's power grid in the winter of 2022, Washington condemned the attacks on civilian energy infrastructure. In March 2024, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for two Russian commanders for directing missile strikes at Ukraine's electric grid, charging harm to civilians that was excessive to any military gain. The law was clear when the bombs were Russian. It did not change when they became American.
Honesty requires the rest of the story. Iran's grid was failing before the first strike. Decades of underinvestment, subsidized prices that starve the industry of revenue, sanctions and heavy government debt to power producers left the country facing a shortfall of 10,000 to 18,000 megawatts this summer, according to the Iranian parliament's own research center. Iran's government owns that failure, and its people have paid for it in darkness and heat for years. But the law protects civilian infrastructure whether it is well run or badly run. A struggling grid is not a lawful target. It is a population already at the edge.
The legal test is plain. An attacker must show that each target served a concrete military purpose and that the expected military advantage outweighed the foreseeable harm to civilians. Two thousand damaged points across generation, transmission and distribution — with water pumps stopped, hospitals strained and millions without cooling in 45-degree heat — is not a list of surgical exceptions. It is a campaign against the system civilians live on. If the United States believes these strikes meet the standard it demanded of Russia, it should say so in public and show its work. It has not.
I hold both of my loyalties without contradiction, because they point to the same truth. The people sweating through blackouts in Tehran and Ahvaz did not choose this war. The law America helped write exists precisely for them — and a nation that authored the rules is judged first by whether it keeps them.
Rupture comes first. Repair comes next. The repair begins by naming what the law already names.
Seven centuries ago, Sa'adi of Shiraz wrote the verse now woven into a carpet that hangs in the United Nations: Human beings are members of one body, created from a single essence — when one member aches, the others cannot rest. He wrote it as poetry. Our grandparents' generation wrote it into law. The least we can do is obey it.
S. Massoud Amin is professor emeritus and former Honeywell/H.W. Sweatt chair in Technological Leadership at the University of Minnesota and widely credited as the father of the smart grid. After Sept. 11, 2001, he directed all critical-infrastructure security research and development for North America's electric utilities. Born in Tabriz, he has lived in the United States since 1978.