When it comes to energy bets, Tajikistan bets on hydropower.
After spending much of the past decade and several billion dollars building the Roghun “megadam,” the task is obviously too ambitious for Tajikistan’s leaders to fail.
But amid emerging prices and long-standing questions about environmental and human impacts, critics say Roghun is also too big to be sustainable.
Tajikistan does not take into account Roghun’s prospects of 3,600 megawatts of installed capacity.
The stakes are high.
And that’s without taking into account whether large-scale hydropower is a sensible direction for a region where climate change will continue to erode the glaciers that feed rivers.
But while some of Tajikistan’s Central Asian neighbors are already diverting their resources to smaller solar and wind projects to make up for their shortfalls, mega-dams, new and old, are still the order of the day in Dushanbe.
Supply outstrips demand
The group’s press release offers few major points about the negotiations, but includes “a specific update on climate through the lens of the water-energy nexus. “
Below are negative and positive developments for Tajikistan’s power sector.
The negative point was a major and still unexplained power outage that plunged the vast majority of the country, including the capital, Dushanbe, into darkness for several hours on March 1.
Local media outlet Asia-Plus quoted a source as saying the outage was an “accident” at the Norak hydroelectric plant, which ultimately produces some of Tajikistan’s electricity.
The state-owned electric power company Barki Tojik made these statements to RFE/RL’s Tajik service.
A few days later, on 4 March, the Deputy Minister of Energy and Water, Sorbon Kholmuhammadzoda, was removed from his post. A government decree has indicated that he will take on a new role, but it is unclear exactly what it will be. .
More encouraging is the news released through the World Bank last month, and shown through the Taliban last week, that the all-important Afghan component of CASA-1000 – a four-country regional power allocation in which Tajikistan is expected to play the role of number one supplier – has returned to normal.
CASA-1000 had been de facto suspended since the Taliban’s return to Afghanistan in 2021, but the World Bank announced that it would continue to finance pylons and other infrastructure in the Afghan segment “in isolation” to distance itself from the radicals. government that has not yet gained foreign recognition.
But power transmission infrastructure is of little use if Tajikistan has power available.
With colder-than-usual temperatures recently hitting Central Asia in the latter part of winter, Tajikistan’s annual power shortage, though now getting worse, has taken its toll.
In recent weeks, RFE/RL’s Tajik service has reported several carbon monoxide deaths, including children, as rural families reloaded their stoves to get through the freezing nights.
And if reports that the Dushanbe blackout is linked to a twist of fate at the Soviet-era Norak hydroelectric power plant are true, it means that progress in Roghun – where lately only two of the six 600-megawatt rigs are in operation – will not be possible. be fast enough.
In December, Rahmon said he expected the third Roghun unit to enter service in 2025.
His personal commitment to the assignment is clear. In 2016, when construction began, he climbed onto a bulldozer to move dirt in a grandiose ground-laying ceremony. Some of the longtime leader’s political subordinates have even called for the HPP to be named after him.
At the time of preparation, the government estimated the total cost at just under $4 billion. After a long lag in the structure of the coronavirus pandemic, the government’s most recent estimate puts the total cost of the task at $6 billion.
The Italian company Webuild (formerly Salini Impregilo) is the prime contractor for the project, but there is no clear clue to reverse the final stages of a facility that Dushanbe will be the tallest of its kind in the world at 335 meters.
So far, Roghun has been funded through a combination of state budget and borrowed money. Initial spending was disproportionately huge for Central Asia’s poorest country, outpacing all other infrastructure spending.
The latter includes a $500 million Eurobond with a yield of 7. 1% issued in 2017, the good fortune of which Reuters hailed as “the latest indication of the continued thirst for high-yield debt, even in frontier markets, so called because of their poverty and lower levels. “credit scores.
Obviously, Tajikistan expects foreign institutions to foot the rest of the bill.
In a statement this month, an organization of 17 nonprofits focused on the environment and government (joined by Prague-based watchdog Bankwatch Network) called on the World Bank, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the European Investment Bank to “reconsider” an obvious pledge of up to $600 million in crowdfunding to Roghun, and described the existing environmental and social impact in the project’s assessment as insufficient for its purpose.
“The advancement of the allocation of the [Roghun] hydropower plant on the Vakhsh River is a cause for great fear due to the enormous social and environmental dangers related to it, only for Tajikistan and for the region as a whole,” the organizations wrote.
A former prominent critic of Roghun has a cautious supporter in recent years.
That’s partly because Tajikistan’s neighbor Uzbekistan, a water-scarce country with around 35 million more people, has prioritized greater regional relations under President Shavkat Mirziyoev than his previous hardline predecessor, Islam Karimov.
But it’s also because Uzbekistan doesn’t know what it wants most: water or electricity, and supplies from Tajikistan could alleviate one of those problems.
But for the region’s renewable energy pioneers Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, who are also thinking about nuclear power, lately this turns out to be just an idea.
At the Tajikistan Effective Energy convention held in Dushanbe in October, Tajik officials said the strength of the sun and wind could contribute up to 70 megawatts to Tajikistan’s total energy by 2030.
But Kholmuhammadzoda, then deputy minister of energy and water, made clear what the government’s precedent was. “Over the next seven years, the power [generation] capacity in Tajikistan will be increased through another 4,000 megawatts of electricity through the commissioning of the Roghun hydropower plant and the reconstruction of other hydropower plants, such as Norak, Sarband and Kairakkum,” he said.
So it’s electric power or bankruptcy. Or “hydropower and the crisis. “
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