Sudan’s grid goes down again as Khartoum buys solar panels instead of air defences

The Al-Markhiyat transformer station was struck on Tuesday 27 October and taken out of service, cutting power across large parts of Khartoum, in what Sudan Tribune counted as the seventh attack on the national grid within a week. The day before, five substations were hit in a single coordinated attack. AFP, citing an unnamed government official, placed two in Al-Jazira, two in Gedaref and one in White Nile; Al-Monitor and Radio Tamazuj, working from the state-owned Sudan Electricity Holding Company, name Al-Jazirah, Sennar and Al-Qadarif instead. Five substations is the common figure across all accounts; the geography is not settled. On Wednesday, Ministry of Energy and Petroleum teams were conducting an engineering assessment of Al-Markhiyat, which the ministry said had sustained extensive damage and which it promised to restore soon — announced, not achieved.

Attribution of the campaign to the Rapid Support Forces rests on the state electricity company’s statement and on an anonymous source inside the national electricity company who told AFP that “RSF militia drones targeted the Al-Markhiyat transformer station.” No RSF claim of responsibility and no independent technical attribution surfaced in the window. The pattern points one way, but the record is government-sourced. Alexandre Fasel, State Secretary of Switzerland, put it plainly at the Geneva consultations on 21 October: “The war in Sudan has become a drone war; it kills mostly civilians.” AFP framed the strikes against a country where some 20 million people face extreme hunger. On Wednesday, Sudan’s foreign ministry undersecretary, Muawiya Osman Khalid, accused Ethiopia of hosting and facilitating the drone attacks and routed a complaint to the United Nations — a single-outlet government claim with no Ethiopian response on the record.

The most revealing act of the 48 hours was commercial. On 28 October Sudan signed a contract for a 20-megawatt solar plant in Northern State and said it welcomed Qatari investment interest, a move Sudan Tribune explicitly framed as diversification in response to the drone campaign. Twenty megawatts replaces almost nothing in national supply terms. What it does is move generation away from the large, fixed, mapped transformer stations that a cheap drone can take out of service for weeks, towards distributed arrays that are harder to switch off with one strike. A government that believed it could defend Al-Markhiyat would be buying air defence, not panels.

Assessment: The grid campaign is what a force does when it cannot take the eastern cities: it makes governing them expensive. Each strike converts into fuel queues, failed water pumping and dead cold chains in states the army actually controls, at a cost per sortie of a few thousand dollars. Two things to distrust here. First, the state list — three outlets, three geographies, which is what happens when a state utility is the only witness to damage in its own network. Second, the timing of the Ethiopia accusation: Port Sudan has aimed its patron complaints almost entirely at Abu Dhabi until now, and this one lands the week Burhan is in Moscow shopping.