Kazakhstan considers possibility to supply electricity to China, Afghanistan and Pakistan

Almaty. May 20. Silkroadnews – Kazakhstan considers possibility to supply electricity to China, Afghanistan and Pakistan, which will require the construction of respective power transmission lines (PTL), the chairman of JSC “KEGOC” board Bakytzhan Kazhiev said, KazTAG reports.

“Kazakhstan considers the export and transit opportunities and with this we consider various directions. (...) For the Chinese direction one shall realize it will require quite large volumes of electricity supply and they are not that much interested in the delivery to the border with the Xinjiang Uygur region. They need a delivery to be done somewhere to the central part, in the vicinity of Wuhan,” B. Kazhiev said at the press conference in Astana on Friday.

“We do carry out such negotiations with our colleagues in China, with “State Grid”, and now we study the possibility to generate such development in Kazakhstan, taking into account the great potential we have to develop both wind and solar power, as well as nuclear power. Yet, to repeat once again, so far the issue is at the stage of consideration only, including possibility of construction of direct current network to operate at several thousand megawatts, it is all at the stage of consideration only,” the head of the company added.

He said there is also a possibility to export the Kazakhstani electricity to Afghanistan and Pakistan, but it requires the construction of power lines as well.

“To consider the export towards Afghanistan and Pakistan, there is really a need for electricity today, but we do not have the transmission network, thus, there is no possibility to deliver the surplus electricity that exists in Kazakhstan at present. Today, Kazakhstan has a surplus of around 4-5 thousand MW. Through the introduction of cap rates we could increase the generation to this volume,” B. Kazhiev noted.

“We consider these directions as a part of CASA-1000 project (it assumes building a power transmission line from Kyrgyzstan to Afghanistan and Pakistan, in particular, 477 km between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, 750km between Tajikistan and Afghanistan and Pakistan – Silkroadnews), as implemented by Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Afghanistan.”

At the same time, he reminded, in winter the south of Kazakhstan also experiences a deficit of electricity.

“Though they assumed the free flow in winter only, that very time when we ourselves have problems delivering electricity to the south of Kazakhstan. And you all know we have excess of electricity in the northern regions only, the south of Kazakhstan suffers a deficit of electricity,” the head of the company said.