The Struggle to Power Tajikistan

Every fall, Muhibahon, a 30-year-old master’s student who lives in Hisor, a small town 30 minutes outside of Tajikistan’s capital, Dushanbe, is forced to drastically change her daily routine. As October sets in, she wakes up at 6 a.m. every day to iron clothes for all five members of her family, make everyone breakfast, prepare some food for dinner, and charge everyone’s phones before local authorities cut off the electricity in her town at 8 a.m.

“Sometimes during the day, I simply don’t have enough battery charge to make a quick call,” Muhibahon told The Diplomat over the messaging app Telegram. (Like everyone else interviewed for this piece, Muhibahon asked to keep her last name out of print fearing retaliation from the government). Her responses in the chat come strictly between 5 p.m. and 11 p.m. local time, when the electricity is turned back on in Hisor. It’s a narrow window of time in which she must do household chores, complete her school assignments, and cook for the family on a smelly wood stove because electricity is too unreliable and gas is too expensive.

Despite this, Muhibahon, who has lived in Hisor for the past six years and is planning to move to Russia, says things used to be much worse. “I used to live in Isfara before moving to Hisor. Back in 2007-08, we didn’t have electricity there for months on end.”

“Back in [the] early and mid-2000s, we had electricity maybe only once a week,” Fotima, a 57-year-old psychologist from Isfara, confirmed to The Diplomat.

Isfara is a town an hour east of Khujand, Tajikistan’s second-largest city. The schedule of electricity access in Isfara today is not much different from the one in Hisor – in the fall, electricity is supplied from 5 a.m. to 8 a.m. and from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m.; in the winter, electricity is cut off mostly from 10 p.m. until 6 a.m. “I go to bed early because I need to be under the covers before power is shut off and the house gets too cold,” said Fotima. “This electricity limit is a source of major stress for women who are forced to cook, wash clothes, and clean their homes in those narrow, unpredictable windows during which we have power.”

The residents of Isfara and Hisor are not alone in their struggles with electricity blackouts: Most of Tajikistan outside of its biggest cities, Dushanbe and Khujand, is subject to annual electricity rationing – scheduled but unannounced blackouts that usually last from early October well into winter, colloquially known as the “electricity limit.”

The experiences of rural residents in the country – stress and uncertainty, lost productivity and business, the cost of repairing electric appliances, and even physical injuries and deaths – come in sharp contrast with annual assurances from the government that there is no rationing of electricity and “occasional” power cuts are merely the result of maintenance work on the country’s power grid. Such pronouncements understandably raise eyebrows over why maintenance work would be done in the winter, when the population needs electricity the most, and not over the summer, when power is in abundance and outages are easier to manage.

“There’s no [electricity] limit, just maintenance works,” Ashraf, a 29-year-old endocrinologist who lives in a village an hour west of Tajikistan’s capital, sarcastically responded over Telegram. “Even my brother who works for the local utility doesn’t receive any information from above about the reasons for power cuts.”

“Nobody even asks about the reasons, people just know that the limit is on come October,” said Fotima.

The rationing costs Tajikistan dearly: economic losses of up to 3 percent of the country’s GDP and of up to a third of the country’s agricultural output. In 2019, over 8 percent of local enterprises named an unreliable electricity supply as a major constraint to doing business in Tajikistan, a share significantly above the average of 3.8 percent across Europe and Central Asia. In 2019, Tajikistan ranked only 163rd among 190 countries for the ease of getting electricity and 107th among 141 countries for the quality of electricity supply.

Three decades’ worth of government promises of energy abundance and independence – promised now by 2030 – only add salt to the wound of the annual electricity rationing. Thirty years after independence, the country still requires significant financial investment in infrastructure and institutional reforms. But the state electricity monopoly, Barqi Tojik – which owns and operates most of the country’s power plants and transmits, dispatches, and distributes electricity to all regions of Tajikistan, except for Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast in the east of the country – holds $2.7 billion in debt (equal to a third of the country’s 2020 GDP).

The government reluctantly admits that energy reforms and infrastructure rehabilitation efforts are slow due to Barqi Tojik’s enormous debt, which, in turn, is the result of a maddening Catch-22: Barqi Tojik desperately needs to raise electricity prices to collect the revenues necessary to reform the energy sector, but the population cannot afford to pay higher prices, in many ways because unreliable electricity supply results in economic losses and low incomes.

Electricity prices in Tajikistan historically have been among the lowest in the world. In 2021, an average domestic consumer in Tajikistan paid $0.023 per kWh, making it the sixth-lowest electricity price in the world. Yet the low price of electricity, meant to be a rare windfall for the economically strained population of Tajikistan, where annual per capita incomes hover around $1,000, can still be unaffordable for locals.

“Don’t get me started on comparing prices between Tajikistan and Russia where most services and products cost the same but salaries are three times higher,“ said Ashraf.

“Electricity is awfully expensive in Tajikistan and gets more expensive every year. My family spends over 10 percent of our monthly budget on electricity,” complained Muhibahon. That puts her family in the high energy burden category, among the households who spend over a tenth of their monthly budget to keep their homes warm and lit.

“Every winter, my family faces a choice – either spend the money we don’t have on electricity to keep the house warm or spend the money we don’t have on cold medicine and doctors,” a resident of Khujand who asked to remain anonymous told The Diplomat.

While often unaffordable for Tajiks, the country’s electricity prices are still too low in the sense that they do not reflect the costs of producing and distributing power. Faced with unaffordable electricity bills, Tajiks often instead pay a bribe to bill collectors that costs less than their monthly bill, which keeps the much-needed revenue out of Barqi Tojik’s coffers. Conflicts between bill collectors and economically strained residents sometimes even result in violence. Internal corruption allegations also abound: In 2019, a Barqi Tojik employee embezzled 96 percent of the revenue he collected; in 2020, prosecutors accused hundreds of low-level Barqi Tojik employees of embezzling over $5.6 million. The collection rate for billed electricity thus hovers at only 85 percent – a rate well below the 95-percent threshold typical for well-functioning energy utilities.

The country’s outdated energy infrastructure was mostly constructed in the 1960s and 1970s and hasn’t been fundamentally updated since then. It loses an estimated quarter of total annual electricity generation, twice the accepted level of technical losses in power systems with similar configurations and age. Coupled with corruption and low collection rates, it prevents Barqi Tojik from covering its operating costs, repairing and replacing its equipment, and improving its infrastructural and institutional capacity, and results in an unreliable power supply that causes stress, injuries, and even deaths among locals. Daytime power cuts across the country interfere with the operating hours of schools, hospitals, banks, and local businesses. There are reports of shortages of coal, wood, and even matches across the country as people are forced to search for different means to keep their businesses running and their houses warm.

“Due to interruptions and power drops, appliances often break down or light up. The AC unit in my office cannot work because the electricity voltage is too low; the wires once even caught on fire and left traces of melted particles on the carpet,” Fotima said, sharing her misfortunes with The Diplomat.

“I have heard of several cases of people getting electrocuted and dying when the power was switched on unexpectedly,” said Munir, an undergraduate student from Panjakent, a town in western Tajikistan.

Under pressure from international donors, the government has committed to slowly reform Tajikistan’s energy sector. Barqi Tojik’s organizational structure is being unbundled into separate electricity generation, transmission, and distribution companies, and the electricity prices are gradually increasing. Additional, albeit limited, investments are being made into upgrading the country’s transmission lines. But instead of putting all its focus on fixing the leaky pipe of energy generation and distribution, the Tajik government has decided to focus on increasing generation and simply push more electricity through the pipe by tapping into the country’s virtually unlimited hydropower potential.

Tajikistan generates over 90 percent of its electricity from glacier-fed rivers. Because the country holds 60 percent of Central Asia’s water resources, most of it in high-altitude glaciers, Tajikistan can in theory produce 527 billion kWh per year – a 25-fold increase of what it generates currently and one of the largest untapped energy potentials in the world. Taking advantage of this potential would, in theory, not only cover all of the country’s domestic energy needs but also make Tajikistan into a net energy exporter and bring in critically needed revenue – something the government has been tirelessly pursuing since Tajikistan became independent in 1991.

In 2021, Tajikistan exported over $94 million worth of electricity to Afghanistan and Uzbekistan and even exported a million kWh per day to Kyrgyzstan in early October before abruptly stopping the trade, reportedly so as not to anger the population as the domestic electricity rationing began. Despite its tough public stance against the Taliban, the Tajik government quietly renewed its contract to continue exporting electricity to Afghanistan in 2022 – an important source of revenue Tajikistan can’t afford to lose.

In 2022, Tajikistan also is set to return to the Central Asian Power System (CAPS) – a regional power-sharing system that during the Soviet years allowed Tajikistan to export surplus energy to its Central Asian neighbors in summer and import energy in winter. This arrangement crumbled with the collapse of the Soviet Union; Tajikistan has been chasing energy exporter status ever since to remain relevant regionally and to collect desperately needed revenue. Under late President Islam Karimov, Uzbekistan shut Tajikistan out from CAPS in 2009 over a regional water resources dispute, preventing Tajikistan from trading energy with other regional states; Karimov’s successor Shavkat Mirziyoyev restored the energy trade between the two countries in April 2018.

Tajikistan has also been pushing for the completion of the $1 billion Central Asia-South Asia Electricity Transmission and Trade Project (CASA-1000), which, if ever finished, would allow Tajikistan to export electricity to Pakistan through Afghanistan.

Both the return to CAPS and the construction of CASA-1000 are tied to the cornerstone of Tajikistan’s ambitions to be at the heart of the Central Asian energy trade: the 3,600 MW Rogun hydropower plant. The plant has been in the works since 1976, but the fall of the Soviet Union, the five-year civil war in the 1990s, and the post-Soviet era dispute with downstream Uzbekistan derailed the progress of the project for decades. The government of Tajikistan spent the post-civil war years trying to rally international support to revive Rogun. In 2016, the government finally restarted the construction of the hydropower plant, which is supposed to double Tajikistan’s current energy generation and turn the country into a net energy exporter at last.

The government is not put off by the price of such aspirations: At the cost of almost $4 billion and with most of the funds borrowed from international creditors, the Rogun hydropower plant has created a budget hole half the size of Tajikistan’s $7 billion annual GDP. Just in 2025-2027 alone, Tajikistan will have to pay $200 million in loan repayments.

This is where the government is setting itself up for failure. Currently, 70 percent of Tajikistan’s power generation is supplied by the Nurek hydropower plant in the south of the country. If Rogun is ever finished, it would concentrate 90 percent of Tajikistan electricity generation in two big hydropower impoundment plants – plants that rely on large river-fed reservoirs to produce power – making the country extremely vulnerable to the accelerating effects of climate change.

Over 8,000 glaciers occupy around 8 percent of Tajikistan’s territory and provide over a fifth of the country’s river water. These glaciers are rapidly disappearing, taking the country’s unlimited and untapped hydropower potential along with them. Tajikistan has lost about a third of its glaciers since the 1930s and is predicted to lose another fifth by 2050. The gradual disappearance of glaciers will significantly reduce river flows and render large impoundment power plants like Rogun and Nurek useless over time.

There have been plenty of warning signs in the past few years. In July 2020, in the middle of the summer surplus season, the water level in the Nurek reservoir was 17 meters lower compared to 2019 because the water flow of the Vakhsh and Panj rivers that feed into the reservoir was reduced by 50 percent. Tajikistan was forced to halt electricity exports to Uzbekistan and Afghanistan that summer. Since then, the government hasn’t gone into detail when discussing the water levels in the Nurek reservoir.

The disappearance of Tajikistan’s glaciers is a regional problem. Neighboring Kyrgyzstan relies on hydropower for 90 percent of its energy needs. The Kyrgyz government, faced with an energy crisis this past fall, reported that the water level at Toktogul – a 1,200 MW hydropower plant that supplies around 40 percent of the country’s electricity – was at its lowest level in years. Uzbekistan, whose hydropower plants account for some 12 percent of the country’s electricity generation, attributed a 23-percent decrease in power supply in 2021 to low water levels, too. But while Uzbekistan, with its proven gas reserves of 800 billion cubic meters and with 88 percent of its electricity coming from thermal power plants, can theoretically protect its energy output from the consequences of glacier melt, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan are in jeopardy and will have to rely on increased regional energy trade, diversification of their power generation portfolio, and much-needed infrastructural rehabilitation and institutional reforms.

In 2021, after years of precedent, Barqi Tojik did not set up hotlines that locals could call to report power outages. This past November, residents of Khujand received a text message from Barqi Tojik urging them to use electricity wisely and threatening further power cuts in response to any energy waste. Such transgressions will continue while the government of Tajikistan figures out how to back out of the dead end it has gotten itself into, leaving the population with no avenue for recourse and dreaming of greener pastures with no power cuts.

“I apologize for leaving our conversation so abruptly yesterday – my phone ran out of battery and there was no way to charge it,” Rukhsora, a high school student from Kanibadam in northern Tajikistan, said in a Telegram voice message. Her family’s only child, she is tasked with helping her mother, a local realtor, get all the domestic chores done during the evening electricity window.

Rukhsora dreams of moving to Dushanbe for her undergraduate studies. “I know there’s no electricity limit there and I won’t have to worry about fully charging my phone every morning,” she laughed in her last voice message to The Diplomat.