TAJIKISTAN’S ENERGY PROJECTS: PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE
Abstract
The first state diesel station with a capacity of 78 kW went into operation in Dushanbe, the republic’s capital, in 1926. And the first hydropower station, Varzobskaia-1, not far from Dushanbe, with a capacity of 7.15 MW was built in 1937. The building of power stations in Tajikistan continued even during the years of the Great Patriotic War (1941-1945), and after it was over, they were erected at an even faster rate. For example, in 1941 the first line of the Khorogskaia hydropower plant in Pamir, the republic’s highest mountainous and most inaccessible region, went into operation, followed in 1945 by the second line.
What is more, in the 1930s, intensive study of the republic’s energy resources began, while plan-ning and surveying work was organized for building new facilities. It was carried out on a planned and systematic basis using world experience. In 1949-1950, the first energy program was developed, which took into account the agricultural proclivity of Tajikistan’s economy,1 thus giving it the name of “Electrification of Agriculture.” It envisaged building 956 hydropower plants, with a unitary capacity of 50 to 3,000 kW, 555 of which were to be built in the republic’s most economically developed north, 328 in the central regions, and 73 in sparsely populated and economically underdeveloped Pamir. Their total capacity amounted to 500 MW.
This was when specialists understood that only hydropower resources could form the foundation of the republic’s energy development. Their supplies are several times higher than the republic’s own needs, while the country has essentially no industrial deposits of oil and gas, and it is very unprofitable to devel-op the nation’s coal fields.2
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Unfortunately, this proclivity continues today. More than 70% of the 6.5 million people in the republic are engaged in agriculture. In so doing, there are 0.11 hectares of land per capita in Tajikistan, 0.08 hectares of which are arable. As a result,according to different estimates, labor migration of the population beyond the country currently amounts to between 350,000 and 1,200,000 people.
See: G. Petrov, “Tajikistan’s Hydropower Resources,” Central Asia and the Caucasus, No. 3 (21), 2003.
Taking into account that hydropower engineering was primarily developed in countries at the heads of rivers, in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, and irrigation in the lower reaches of rivers, in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan, after the U.S.S.R.
isintegrated and the Central Asian countries acquired their independence, this became the region’s most serious inter-republic problem.
It was population growth, which was actively supported by Soviet state policy, which fell on favorable religious and national soil, and later became a very serious economic, social, and political problem for Tajikistan. Today 6.5 million people live in the country.
Unfortunately, many of them installed at the end of the 1980s did not even start operating, and after 1992 Pamir’s diesel power stations ceased to function at all due to a lack of fuel.
For the sake of objectivity, it should be noted that one of the reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Union was that too much attention was focused on development of the energy complex: oil and gas, coal, hydropower, to the detriment both of the environment and efficient energy use. As a result, the Soviet Union’s entire economy could not compete with developed coun-tries and went bankrupt.
The creation of the private energy company in Pamir mentioned above is also affiliated with implementation of the small hydropower plant development program, since the total capacity of this energy system (30 MW) is equal to the maximum capac-ity of one small hydropower plant.
The fact that the country’s own funds should become the foundation for a revival in power engineering is confirmed by the practice of recent years. Despite all efforts, including by the republic’s government, only 45 million dollars in foreign invest-ments granted by the Asian Bank of Development (to be allotted over the span of five years) were generated for rehabilitation of the energy system. This is only 5% of the funds needed for this purpose.
Today raising the cost of electricity is a bugbear for the population. But if we look at world practice, it turns out that the most developed countries (with the highest standard of living) have the highest electricity costs. Their increase is the “end point”in the chain of reforms to improve the economy and state’s financial and credit sphere. This is why they can be an indicator of the country’s economic development, the basis of which is power engineering.
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