The Azerbaijani president gave the interview to AzTV in Nakhchivan late on Tuesday. The project to lay transmission lines from Azerbaijan to its exclave through Armenia is ready, he said; the export of very large volumes of electricity from Nakhchivan "will also be envisaged", and a second railway line to Iran will open after the corridor does. A hydropower plant at Ordubad is planned alongside. He gave no capacity, no cost and no timeline.
The statement lands days after the first anniversary of the Washington declaration that created TRIPP, the transit route through Syunik that Baku calls the Zangezur corridor. Everything published about that route so far is transport: engineering surveys on Armenia's railway section, Azerbaijan's connecting road and rail nearing completion, the Trans-Caspian Enterprise Fund capitalised at $201 million with a board elected last week. On 10 August, diplomats of Azerbaijan, the United States and Armenia met in Washington on implementation, border delimitation and confidence measures, and announced no agreements.
Electricity is a different kind of cargo. A road carries what is put on it, when it is put there; a transmission line is a standing connection, planned in decades and priced in guarantees. Baku already exports power westward through Georgia. A line through Syunik would make Armenia transit territory for the Azerbaijani grid, tie Nakhchivan's planned generation to Azerbaijani export markets, and give both sides a physical asset whose interruption costs someone money every hour. That is either the strongest confidence-building measure available in the region or a dependency Yerevan has never publicly agreed to host. Aliyev's own framing was the broader one: the corridor, he said, should be seen in a wider context than transport.
“A transmission line is a standing connection, planned in decades and priced in guarantees.”
What is missing is the other signature. No Armenian body has published a position on an electricity component; the treaty texts made public around Washington do not mention one; and the interview arrived in the same week Moscow attached dates to its own pressure on Yerevan's membership file. A project that is ready on one side of a border is a design. The measure of this one will be the first Armenian document that prices the transit, and none exists in public.