Climate Change Is Ruining Tajikistan’s Energy Plans

On July 28, Afghanistan’s national utility company issued a statement notifying customers that due to water shortages, Tajikistan would be reducing the electricity it exported to Afghanistan from 350 megawatts to just 40 megawatts. The nearly 90 percent reduction invariably will mean shortages in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan has come a long way out of the dark, with 2018 World Bank statistics claiming that 98 percent of the Afghan population had access to electricity compared to just 42 percent in 2008. Other sources are less rosy, such as a 2016 study on Afghanistan’s energy security by Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES), which claimed that while 70 percent of consumers in Kabul enjoyed “a nearly uninterrupted supply of electricity, up to three quarters (67–75 percent) of the Afghan population are still cut off from the power grids.”

An estimated 80 percent of Afghanistan’s energy supplies are imported, largely from Central Asia.

The 2016 FES study, which dealt with data up through 2015, noted that “[w]hat appears to be stable power and fuel deliveries to Afghanistan from Central Asia may not be sustainable in the medium to long term.” That conclusion, however, was based on the circumstances and energy politics of the time and did not factor in the consequential matter of climate change. The politics have since shifted, dramatically in some cases, and the impacts of climate change are becoming apparent.

The 2009 breakdown of the Central Asian Power System (CAPS) – the Societ era unified electricity grid that spanned the region – meant Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan had excess electricity for export. In the short term, Afghanistan was an easy customer for both Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. The CAPS breakdown also motivated the construction of the Central Asia-South Asia power project (CASA-1000), which was envisioned as enabling mountainous Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan to export more electricity, generated via hydropower, to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The 2016 FES report highlighted that one issue regarding supplies from Tajikistan was seasonal variability.

Due to seasonal variations of power production, Tajikistan enjoys excessive electricity generation capacity in summer and experiences power shortages in winter. This does not only limit its capability to supply power to Afghanistan, but also makes it hard to meet its own domestic power needs; Tajikistan itself suffers from a critical shortage of electricity supply in the winter months, during which electricity demand exceeds supply capacity by around 25 percent. 

Meanwhile, at the time the report was written Afghanistan’s relationship with its largest electricity supplier, Uzbekistan, was categorized as “stable but not reliable, as the Afghan government struggles to do business with its Uzbek counterpart.” Uzbekistan at the time charged far more for electricity than Tajikistan and Uzbek President Islam Karimov was militantly against Tajikistan’s ambitions to construct additional dams, which would boost its ability to supply Afghanistan.

Much has changed since, particularly with regard to Uzbekistan: In late August 2016 Karimov died and with him died much of the animus between Uzbekistan and Tajikistan and the latent tensions with Afghanistan. By 2018, Tajik and Uzbek relations had improved such that Tashkent no longer objected to the ongoing construction of the massive Rogun dam and Dushanbe had agreed to plug back into the regional electricity grid, via Uzbekistan. Uzbekistan has also, since 2016, made great strides in improving its relations with Afghanistan, in 2018 cutting tariffs on electricity exported to Afghanistan, increasing the wattage exported, and committing to constructing a new electricity line in July 2019.

When it comes to Tajikistan, however, while the politics have not shifted measurably climate change is rearing its ugly head. While it was previously true that Tajikistan enjoyed a surplus of electricity in the summer – its hydropower plants humming through torrents of water melting off the mountains – that is no longer reliably the case.

A mild 2019-2020 winter meant less snowfall than usual on Tajikistan’s peaks. According to a statement posted on the Tajik president’s website in late July 2020, snowfall in areas that melt into the Vakhsh River was half that of the previous season and as a result the volume of water in the river was also half of last year’s flow. Downstream, water levels at the Nurek Reservoir, which provides water for the Nurek Dam, were stated by the government as 17 meters below last year’s level.

As a result, Tajikistan cut nearly all of its electricity exports to Afghanistan – from 350 megawatts to 40 megawatts in late July. Dushanbe also cut exports to Uzbekistan, with which it had reached a deal in May to export electricity through the summer until September. Uzbekistan turned to Turkmenistan to backfill its domestic demands and Afghanistan increased its imports of electricity from Uzbekistan.

Hydropower projects in Tajikistan have been sold by the government and international partners as the answer both to frequent local power shortages and the country’s economic doldrums. If only Tajikistan could harness the potential flowing off its mountains and export the excess to needy neighbors, the narrative went, all would be well. But long delays in construction of key projects – some first envisioned more than 50 years ago – gave climate change a chance to rob Tajikistan of its energy-flush future.

In November 2018, Tajikistan commissioned the first turbine at the partially constructed Rogun dam, which sits on the Vakhsh River, upstream from Nurek. In September 2019, a second turbine came online. Rogun – a project that dates to 1976 and designed as the world’s tallest dam once, if ever, completed – has long been portrayed as the solution to Tajikistan’s energy and economic ills. With six turbines planned, it is designed to put out 3,600 MW. But these dam dreams are reliant on one thing in increasingly short supply: water.