Kazakhstan’s uranium bargain with China

[on-hold music] Okay, so we're gonna turn to the story of electricity in Central Asia, and we're gonna be looking at three different countries, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan.

And I'm going to try to keep this as technically simple for my own sake, but also for the sake of the listeners.

There's a lot of numbers and data which I will try to avoid getting into because I think that might confuse things a little bit.

But there are some broad trends and headlines that I, that I would just like to bring up, and, and, and they're topical, particularly at this time of year.

You tend to get a lot of these mid-year press conferences from ministers all over the region.

This is a time for taking stock of where the country is, where the economy is, but also where important things like the electricity sector is.

And a lot of the things I'm about to talk about really are the, the product of, of press conferences, of announcements, of statements like that.

So this is why we're, we're talking about it.

So I, I wanted to begin with Kyrgyzstan and the announcement that came out of Bishkek, out of the energy ministry in Bishkek, is that the expectation is that this year Kyrgyzstan will import a little more than four billion kilowatt-hours of electricity.

Now, to put that number in context, that is a little bit more than what was imported in twenty twenty-five.

So twenty twenty-five it was three point eight billion kilowatt-hours, and this is not just something, a slight increase this year.

This is a number which if you plot it on a graph, it's gradually going up and up and up every single year because cities are growing more crowded, populations are growing bigger.

Why is it important that cities are growing crowded? Because people move to cities, they get air conditioners, they get electric heaters in winter, and so demand for electricity is, is rising accordingly.

So the imports typically come from a number of countries, actually.

Places like Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, even Russia.

The situation in Kyrgyzstan is that Kyrgyzstan does produce quite a lot of its own electricity.

In twenty twenty-five, that was about fifteen point four billion kilowatt hours.

So if you see that it's importing roughly four and making about fifteen and a half, you can see what the degree of dependence there is.

It really is quite, quite considerable.

The vulnerability really, as I say, comes from the fact that Kyrgyzstan's electricity generation system depends so heavily on hydropower.

So about three-quarters of electricity generation in Kyrgyzstan is basically contingent on things like the Toktogul Reservoir, which was-- it's an old reservoir built in Soviet times and has been in the news a lot in recent years because from time to time, we get updates about how much water there is in the Toktogul Reservoir, and it's much less than is comfortable.

So it's reached its critically low levels a number of times over the years, and even at the moment the levels are relatively low.

Kyrgyzstan is in the situation where it needs to wait until the reservoir fills up a little bit before it can release the water, and by releasing the water, produce electricity for itself.

And the situation is, is additionally complicated because, of course, releasing water is not just about producing electricity, but also releasing water to go down to downstream countries like Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, which depend on that water to irrigate their crops, right? It's an incredibly complicated and messy picture and it-- and it's, and it's becoming more complicated because of things like climate change.

Glaciers are disappearing, and so countries in the region also have to keep an eye on the fact that incoming water resources are, are not always very consistent, and they're going to become much less consistent in the decades that come.