Winter Blackouts Blamed on Poor Planning

Serious disruptions to the power supply are expected across Tajikistan in December, with predictions of blackouts lasting several days at a time. Although officials insist the power outages are unavoidable and could not have been timed to happen in a warmer season, NBCentralAsia commentators say the problems have been caused by delays to the construction schedule of new hydroelectric power stations. They warn the outages will come at a severe economic cost.



The river Vakhsh in southern Tajikistan is scheduled to be closed off altogether in mid December to enable construction work to go ahead for the Sangtuda-1 hydroelectric power station. Restrictions on power availability have already been introduced in several provinces as well as in the capital Dushanbe.



There have been electricity shortages over the winter for several years now, but this will be the first time a blackout on such a scale has happened. NBCentralAsia commentators say there is no guarantee that the power restrictions will not be extended until the end of December.



Work on Sangtuda-1 was launched in 2005 and is expected to be completed in 2009. With a design capacity of 2.7 billion kilowatt hours per annum, the plant should not only meet the local demand for electricity but also give scope to sell Tajik power abroad.



Barki Tojik, the Tajik state electricity provider which is working with Russia’s United Energy Systems, UES, to build the power station, says the power outages could not have been avoided because the river flow could not be blocked before November or December, when the water levels are at their lowest.



But energy experts say management of the project has been poorly coordinated, leading to delays to the start of construction and the ensuing power cuts at the coldest time of the year.



“By the middle of the summer, some of the contractors had already failed to meet deadlines. That all contributed to the date for the river blockage being put off,” said an industry expert working for Barki Tochik. “Even though UES had imposed strict conditions, and the contractors stepped up the pace of work, they failed and the delay means the work will only happen on [December] 12.”



Tajikistan’s energy ministry told NBCentralAsia that the managers of the construction project were informed too late in the day that the river closure had been postponed from an earlier deadline of the start of December. By that point they had already started letting water out of two reservoirs on the river Vakhsh.



Energy experts say this failure to coordinate will now mean that power supply restrictions will last longer than anticipated.



The Tajik government is seeking to mitigate the effects of the crisis as winter weather approaches. A source in the energy ministry said a formal request has been sent to the government of Uzbekistan, with which the Tajiks have previously sought to negotiate the purchase of 500 million kilowatt/hours of energy plus an arrangement where two billion kilowatt/hour of Kyrgyz electricity could reach Tajikistan via the Uzbek grid.



Talks on these issues have failed three times, with the Uzbeks refusing to agree because they lack the technical infrastructure to deliver this much electricity. At this point, though, the Tajik authorities are prepared to pay whatever the Uzbeks ask for.



Apart from the huge financial cost of buying in electricity from Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, the domestic economy would also suffer major losses if the Tajik aluminium plant at Tursunzade ground to a halt for lack of power. The aluminium producer is Tajikistan’s largest industrial concern and accounts for 17 per cent of gross national product.



Tursunzade can run only on electrical power, and has never yet halted operations. According to one economist, “If there is a stoppage lasting one day, it will take a long time to restart a production unit [at the plan], and it may be easier to build a new unit instead.”



(News Briefing Central Asia draws comment and analysis from a broad range of political observers across the region.)