The Azerbaijani president gave the interview to AzTV in Nakhchivan, and APA carried the text late on Tuesday. "Our project to lay power transmission lines from the main part of Azerbaijan to Nakhchivan through the territory of Armenia is ready," he said. The rest of the energy passage is smaller than the rhetoric around it: solar in Nakhchivan that "could reach at least 500 megawatts" and perhaps 1,000, and a hydroelectric station "with a capacity of slightly over 15 megawatts" at Tivi in Ordubad. To RIA on Wednesday he named the destination. Azerbaijan has entered the European market with oil and gas, he said, and wants to enter it with electricity; today it has one route, through Georgia and Turkey.
Arman Yeghoyan of the governing Civil Contract faction gave the substantive answer in parliament on Wednesday. Energy exchange, trade, buying and selling of energy "just like all other goods and services, of course, should not be an exception to bilateral trade," he said, noting that Armenia already sells power to Iran and Georgia. Earlier the same day he refused the noun: there is no concept and no infrastructure called the Zangezur corridor on the territory of the Republic of Armenia, only TRIPP, which carries three signatures.
Narek Karapetyan, who leads the opposition Strong Armenia faction, priced it instead. "If they want to build electricity transmission lines through Armenian territory, they should pay us for it. Let them pay and build them if they want to." A route across sovereign territory, he argues, is not any other country’s to name.
So the argument in Yerevan runs on the word and the tariff. Pashinyan endorsed this class of project on 2 July, standing beside Ursula von der Leyen, when he said transmission lines and connectors could serve energy security and the green transition at once.
One part of Tuesday’s interview went unanswered. Armenpress reported on Wednesday that Azerbaijani specialists have analysed and identified where pylons could stand inside Armenia, and that Aliyev hopes Armenia will not delay. No Armenian official addressed the survey.
Let them pay and build them if they want to.
The executive branch stayed out of it altogether. The newest items on the prime minister’s site and on the foreign ministry’s were both dated Tuesday at our last read, and neither the infrastructure ministry nor Electric Networks of Armenia said anything. Parliament is where Armenia is speaking this week: the eighth National Assembly, elected on 7 June, spent Wednesday agreeing committee chairs.