Central Asia in race to close power-generation gap – report

Less hydropower and more wind, solar and nuclear energy is needed in Central Asia to erase an electricity deficit and enable the realisation of the region’s economic growth and trade ambitions, according to a report published by the Washington, DC-based New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy (NLI).

The report, titled Powering Growth: Solving Central Asia’s Electricity Challenge and produced under NLI's Silk Seven Plus (S7+) initiative, highlights how Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan have all recently announced plans to develop electricity-intensive digital economies, featuring AI hubs and data centres. However, each presently lacks the power-generating capacity to match their respective economic growth agendas. 

Adding to the complexity of the challenge of boosting power-generating capacity is the region’s robust population growth rate combined with the rapid depletion of water resources. For much of the past 75 years, hydropower has been a major source of electricity generation in Central Asia overall.

“A pivotal challenge facing regional leaders is whether they can develop enough new power sources – including hydro-driven, solar, wind, and nuclear – fast enough to fulfil their economic ambitions,” the NLI report states. “The chances of success would be greatly enhanced by the operation of a more effective regional entity to coordinate the efficient generation and distribution of electricity.”

A regional organisation existed prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union to regulate regional power production and distribution, but the system broke down in the 2000s, as the five Central Asian states failed to find a mutually equitable balance to the region’s water-energy nexus, under which upstream states Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan need water for hydropower generation in the winter while the downstream states of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan require copious amounts of water for irrigation during the summertime growing season. 

A regional management system still exists but it tends to address issues on an ad hoc, not systematic basis, and it lacks enforcement powers. Central Asia’s power grid is also not fully connected.

The report highlights Central Asian states’ plans to add power-generating capacity in the coming decades, while raising questions about whether those plans can be implemented according to established timelines.

“Meeting the production targets specified in [power-generation] plans is far from assured, given questions surrounding financing, as well as technological and logistical challenges,” the report states. As an example, it points to a recent development in which financing delays have disrupted Kazakh government plans to refurbish and build new power plants. Financing difficulties also threaten to delay initiatives by Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan to build nuclear power plants.

The NLI report recommends that Central Asia scale back plans to add hydropower capacity, in particular rethinking Tajikistan’s Rogun and Kyrgyzstan’s Kambarata-1 mega-dam projects. Instead, those two countries need to place greater emphasis on solar and wind.

“Solar and wind power represent the fastest way Central Asian states can add generating capacity without complicating efforts to achieve greenhouse gas emission reduction goals,” the report states.  “Solar and wind power are also widely seen as cheaper to generate than nuclear energy. They also do not threaten the region’s critical water-energy nexus.”

Another report recommendation is for Central Asia states to eschew large-scale nuclear power plants in favour of small modular nuclear reactors (SMR). Such reactors are faster and cheaper to build than the larger plants proposed by Russia and China. They are also widely seen as safer and less water-intensive to operate.

“SMRs are generally seen as safer to operate and can be deployed in areas unsuitable for large reactors and thus are better suited for operation in Central Asia and would be able to meet the region’s growing near- and medium-term power needs,” according to the NLI report.

This article first appeared on Eurasianet here.