Iran’s energy minister says the country’s demand for electricity has increased significantly in recent years to reach levels seen in industrial and populous countries like Germany.

Ali Akbar Mehrabian disclosed the figure in a Tuesday meeting with members of the Iranian parliament’s energy committee.

Mehrabian said power demand in Iran had reached more than 79 gigawatts (GW) this summer, on par with 80 GW of demand reported in Germany and much higher than the demands of 50 GW in Turkey and 30 GW in Egypt.

He said that Iran had added over 10 GW of new electricity generation capacity in the past three years and has nearly 8 GW of capacity under construction.

The minister added that the country needs to spend nearly $1 billion on creating 1 GW of new power plant capacity.

Iran has nearly 100 GW of electricity generation capacity, a bulk of which comes from thermal power plants.

Record temperatures and rising demand for cooling caused an increase of nearly 9% in Iran’s power demand this summer compared to last year.

Mehrabian said last month that Iran had added an average of 15.2 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) to its annual production of electricity in the past three years to reach a current figure of 332 billion kWh.

He added the total number of customers of the Iranian power grid had reached 40.7 million, up from 37.7 million reported in August 2021 when he took over as energy minister.