Winter Is Coming to Kyrgyzstan

On most days in October, Kyrgyz news website 24.kg posted an article with the next day’s date and the title: “Where the lights will be turned off in Bishkek and regions.” What follows is a list of times and places for possible power outages as provided by Kyrgyz electricity distribution companies, usually related to maintenance work.

On October 14, for example, on more than a dozen streets in the village of Lebedinovka on the outskirts of Bishkek, from 9 in the morning until 6 in the evening there was the possibility of power outages. The same was true of dozens of streets in the capital and in surrounding villages and towns.

Kyrgyzstan’s aged electricity infrastructure is in near constant need of upkeep. In a 2020 profile of Kyrgyzstan, the International Energy Agency (IEA) noted that the country’s energy sector suffers from a lack of investment and is “characterised by aged infrastructure and significant losses.” The report goes on:

System wear and tear is gauged at over 50%: significant deterioration of energy assets and poor sector development are the result of heavy subsidies, particularly for electricity consumption, which drain resources for system maintenance and investment. Unable to finance the necessary rehabilitation of its natural gas network, Kyrgyzstan sold it to Gazprom for USD 1 in 2013. Gazprom is to invest USD 600 million in the system over a 25-year period

Domestic energy production, the report notes, “covers roughly half of annual consumption, with imports necessary to meet the remaining demand.” Around half of the country’s domestically generated energy comes form hydropower plants, and around 40 percent from coal. In the decade between 2010 and 2020, coal production in Kyrgyzstan quadrupled, “driven by the government’s decision to boost coal production in order to decrease dependence on imports, foster decentralised heating supply and minimise the use of electricity for heating purposes by households.”

As the first signs of winter crept through Central Asia last month – with Almaty in southwestern Kazakhstan seeing its first snow on October 6 –  the region’s energy woes are rising once more to the surface. And in Kyrgyzstan, energy woes can quickly morph into political turbulence.

In late September, the chairman of the board of Kyrgyzstan’s National Energy Holding company briefed journalists on “necessary measures” required to reduce electricity consumption in order to ensure the supply of electricity through the autumn and winter period. Talaibek Baigaziev said measures would include restrictions on lighting of secondary streets, advertisements, cafes, and shopfronts.

A few days later, the National Energy Company walked back the warning, deciding to nix plans to limit nighttime lighting in the capital, but remained adamant that customers use alternative sources of energy for heating, such as gas or coal, to avoid electricity shortages in the coming colder seasons.

The culprits for the shortage are a pernicious pair: rising electricity consumption and falling water levels at the critical Toktogul reservoir.

Baigaziev said that annual growth of electricity consumption was over 10 percent, and over 25 percent in some regions. Meanwhile, as of October 3, after a summer drought, the water volume at Toktogul amounted to 12.3 billion cubic meters, almost 3.0 billion cubic meters lower than the same period in 2020.

As Eurasianet reported, “Officials are attributing the collapse in reservoir levels to the periodic waxing and waning of glacier runoffs that they say occurs on a roughly decade-long cycle. The last time Kyrgyzstan faced a crisis of similar proportions was in 2008-09, when rolling brownouts meant many homes were not getting power for up to seven hours daily.”

In early 2010, after a rough winter typified by outages, Kyrgyz state authorities proposed massive increases in energy tariffs and media reported that heating costs were set to rise 400 percent. Public frustrations emerged with the spring thaw, contributing to the litany of grievances which sparked Kyrgyzstan’s April 2010 revolution that ousted the government of Kurmanbek Bakiyev.

In early 2018, it was the breakdown of operations at the Bishkek thermal power plant – which uses gas and coal to generate heat and electricity – that set the country on the path to the ultimate arrest of former President Almazbek Atambayev. The Atambayev administration had overseen the modernization of the plant by a Chinese company; it was completed just months before its catastrophic mid-winter failure. It was later reported that of the $386 million loan China provided to renovate the facility, officials skimmed around $100 million off the top.

RFE/RL reported recently that officials in the Kyrgyz capital were already bringing extra truckloads of coal into the city to keep the plant running. Meanwhile, the State Committee for National Security dispatched a special forces unit to guard one of the country’s largest coal mines as coal prices spike across the country.

The onset of colder temperatures coincides with Kyrgyzstan’s parliamentary election on November 28. It’s expected to be a confusing mess under an array of new rules following the approval of a new constitution earlier this year. The new constitution once again shifted  Kyrgyzstan back to a presidential model, after a decade flirtation with parliamentary democracy.

All roads now lead to President Sadyr Japarov, and so will all the blame when the lights go out and cold creeps in.