North Korea electricity conservation drive mocked amid chronic blackouts

North Korea’s electricity shortage has become so severe that a state-run campaign urging people to conserve power is drawing open ridicule from the very people it targets.

Teachers at a middle school in Hyesan, the capital of Ryanggang province, went door-to-door through neighborhood watch units on March 28 to deliver the regime’s latest propaganda drive on electricity conservation, a Daily NK source in Ryanggang province reported Wednesday.

The outreach relied on official propaganda pamphlets framing electricity conservation as a “patriotic duty,” with the materials claiming that reduced household consumption would advance national development and improve living standards.

Teachers singled out specific behaviors as wasteful: cooking with electric rice cookers, using voltage boosters to compensate for low power supply, rotating two or three batteries on alternating charge cycles, and cooking with electric frying pans. People were warned that anyone caught engaging in these practices would face strict punishment.

The reaction was openly dismissive. “There has to be electricity first before there’s anything to save,” one person said, according to the source. “The power’s been cut for days at a time. What exactly are they accusing us of using?” Others privately mocked the campaign as absurd once the teachers had left.

Blaming the people for the state’s electricity failures

Beyond frustration, some in Hyesan accused the authorities of trying to shift responsibility for the country’s chronic power failures onto individuals rather than addressing structural causes. The state, they argued, was demanding sacrifice and patience without making any effort to fix the underlying problem.

The teachers tasked with delivering the campaign were themselves caught in a difficult position. Already burdened with classroom duties and administrative work, they were also assigned to manage neighborhood watch unit outreach. The source said the teachers privately agreed with the people they were addressing but carried out the assignment because it came from above.

In practice, the source said, teachers often hand off propaganda materials to neighborhood watch unit leaders, who then pass them along to members in a purely perfunctory way. “The electricity conservation campaign is becoming a formality,” the source said, “leaving both the teachers and the people exhausted and nothing more.”

Neighborhood watch units, known in Korean as inminban, are the state’s grassroots surveillance and administrative cells. Each unit covers roughly 20 to 30 households and is responsible for enforcing government directives at the community level, including propaganda dissemination.

North Korea’s electricity shortage has been a persistent problem for decades, worsened by aging infrastructure, fuel scarcity, and limited capacity at state-run power plants. The regime periodically launches conservation campaigns, but chronic supply failures undercut any official messaging about household waste.

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