According to the Iran.ru news agency, Iranian Minister of Energy Ali-Akbar Mehrabian has said that his country is open to trading electricity with Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.
Iran currently exchanges electricity with the majority of its neighbors, according to Mehrabian, who made the statement in Tehran during a meeting with Uzbek Minister of Energy Zhorabek Mirzamakhmudov on March 4. Mehrabian paid particular attention to the growth of cooperation between Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan in the area of electricity markets and trading.
As part of the Unified Energy System of Central Asia (UESCA), which was established during the Soviet era, the energy systems of Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan currently operate separately. Turkmenistan exited the system in 2003, which was a direct result of Uzbekistan’s refusal to allow electricity from Turkmenistan to transit across Uzbek grid infrastructure.
Tajikistan was automatically disqualified from the UESCA when Uzbekistan unilaterally withdrew following a significant accident in Tajikistan’s energy system in November 2009 — a catastrophe that also led Kazakhstan to accuse Tajikistan in that same month of stealing power from the grid. In 2018, the regional system was rebooted with the return of Uzbekistan to UESCA.
In 2019 Tajikistan began work to rejoin the unified energy grid ring of Central Asia, with financial assistance from the Asian Development Bank. Tajikistan’s Ministry of Energy declared last summer that the country would like to become a member of the regional system by the end of 2023, but little progress has been made up to the present. One positive sign of note is that since 2018, Tajikistan has been supplying electricity to some districts of Uzbekistan’s Surkhandarya region — because those districts aren’t connected to the Uzbek central power distribution grid.
