In many places in the world where electricity from centralized grids is unreliable or inaccessible, small generators power everyday life. During the Lebanese civil war of 1975-1990, generators became ubiquitous all over cities like Beirut and its suburbs as war disconnected neighborhoods – and infrastructures and services- from each other. Nearly three decades after the end of the civil war, electricity infrastructures in Lebanon remain a fragmented and overlapping set of arrangements. This paper traces the emergence and endurance of electricity generator subscription services in Lebanon, and the rise of municipal-scale attempts to manage these services. Rather than imagining how these systems exist in opposition to the state, as a kind of “shadow” network, what are the ways in which these patchwork systems – infrastructural failure, rather than success or even distribution – actually constitute a kind of state project? How might we regard these arrangements as a symptom of diminishing modernist imaginaries of large state projects rather than merely the continued “failures” of infrastructure brought about by conflict-era destruction?