Uzbekistan to create power grid ring

• 2 years ago (2022-01-31)
• David Flin

Asia 846 Transmission 181

---

Uzbekistan has announced plans to create a power grid ring to improve reliability of electricity supplies. All regions of the country will be connected to one grid.

This will involve construction of additional 500-750 kV electrical networks. Power generation capacity will be increased to 27.4 GW and annual electricity generation will be boosted to 110 TWh by 2026.

The failure within the Central Asian power grid on January 25 affected all power plants in Uzbekistan, leaving the whole of Kyrgyzstan and southern Kazakhstan without power.

A government commission has been set up to investigate the cause of the outage. It has not yet published its results, but a representative of the Ministry of Energy of Uzbekistan said that the failure occurred at the 3600 MW Syrdarya thermal power plant. A spokesman for the Ministry of Energy said: “Capacity of 1600 MW was lost at the plant. The power system protection disconnected the electricity generation facilities from the Central Asian power grid.”