Tajikistan Exporting Electricity During Winter Blackouts, 4 April 2014

While Tajiks were suffering through daily electricity blackouts this winter, their government was exporting electricity to Afghanistan, official statistics show. Electricity exports are a hot topic in Central Asia lately. Only last week the World Bank announced it had earmarked $526.5 million in credit and grants for an ambitious project to help Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan export electricity to South Asia starting in 2018: CASA-1000...

Extended, rolling blackouts are standard in mountainous Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan each winter, when reservoirs are exhausted and waiting for the spring thaw to refill. In recent weeks, the problem became acute in Tajikistan, with some areas only receiving 30 minutes of electricity per day, or even none at all, RFE/RL reported on March 27...

According to monitoring reports prepared by Tajikistan’s Ministry of Economic Development and Trade, in February the country exported over 3 percent of the electricity it produced, or 41 million kWh, to Afghanistan; in January it exported 2 percent. That might not sound like a lot, except to the thousands of Tajiks sitting in the dark day and night.That electricity was exported from two newish hydropower dams, the Russian-built and controlled Sangtuda-1, and the Iranian-built and controlled Sangtuda-2. The companies behind both dams complained this winter that they were having trouble staying afloat because Tajikistan’s electricity-distributing monopoly, Barqi Tojik, has not been paying for power...

So any exports might have been designed to quietly pay off some of Barqi Tojik’s debts—indeed, there have been reports of Russian pressure on Barqi Tojik to allow exports of electricity from Sangtuda-1 to Afghanistan. But there is no publicly available data on how much money the exports brought into the country, or where it went...

World Bank officials promise CASA-1000 will only be used in the summer, when melting snows endow Tajikistan’s reservoirs with a surplus. But can anyone be sure? Barqi Tojik, that perennially broke state electricity distributor, seems to do everything it can to muddy its statistics. Local journalists have long speculated that these winter exports are lining someone’s pockets. Besides, the new power lines will not sit idle in winter, said the source close to negotiations: “CASA-1000 would operate under an ‘open access’ regime which will allow any neighboring country to export additional power through the CASA-1000 transmission line when the line has surplus capacity during non-summer months.” It sounds like the World Bank is entrusting Tajikistan to define what is “surplus.”