At the bank’s annual meeting on 25 June, an EDB analyst laid out the region’s energy bind in plain terms. Infrastructure, both generation and grids, is old, and losses run as high as 20%. Demand is climbing. The flexible capacity needed to absorb wind and solar is thin, and cross-border electricity trade is still underdeveloped.
The bank’s prescription is unfashionable. Alongside more renewables, it calls for modernising existing thermal plants and adding gas-fired generation, the flexible backbone that lets an intermittent solar fleet stay on the grid without browning out. In a region courting green capital, the honest engineering answer still has gas in it.
Read this next to the nuclear push and the order of operations looks odd. Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan are committing tens of billions to reactors that will not produce power until the mid-2030s. Meanwhile a fifth of today’s electricity leaks out of the lines between the plant and the socket. The reactor in 2034 gets the ceremony. The fifth lost tonight is the cheaper fix nobody cuts a ribbon for.
The reactor in 2034 gets the ceremony. The fifth lost tonight is the fix nobody cuts a ribbon for.
There is a regional layer too. The single most cost-effective upgrade may be letting electricity move across borders, so a surplus in one country covers a shortfall in another, the same connective logic the region is applying to its roads and its money. The grids physically exist. The agreements to trade power over them mostly do not.
The lesson sits under the announcements. New capacity, nuclear or solar, is needed, but a system that loses a fifth of its output and cannot trade across a border will swallow much of the gain. The expensive plant is being built. The cheap reforms, metering, maintenance, transmission, cross-border trade, are the ones that decide whether it helps.