Kazakhstan has significant potential for renewable and alternative energy sources like wind and solar power. The country is well-suited for large-scale wind power installations due to its high wind potential. It is also focusing on developing rural areas through small solar panel schemes. Additionally, the economic slowdown has reduced energy demand and provided breathing room to refurbish aging coal plants and extend the national power grid to bring reliable electricity to more populated areas.

1. ENERGY
With government backing and investment, non-conventional
and alternative power sources have huge potential.
Clare Nuttall and Serik Jaxylyk look at the alternatives
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The sharp slowdown in economic activity, and especially the steep Toktogul hydropower reservoir ran out of water before the end
decline in mining and metals processing, has had the completely of winter.
unintended benefit of banishing earlier fears that years of under- Such problems should be eliminated once the first stage of the
investment had left Kazakhstan dangerously short of electricity. 3,000km gas pipeline, which will carry up to 30 billion cubic
Over the first two months of 2009, electricity output declined by metres (bcm) of Turkmen, Uzbek and Kazakh gas east to China, is
9.7 per cent compared to the same period a year earlier, when the completed later this year. The new export line will give a steady and
economy was still expanding at close to double digits. With output secure supply of gas to the whole of southern Kazakhstan, for the
expected to rise only slowly, the economic slowdown provides a first time.
welcome respite for the power companies. It gives them breathing The new export pipeline to China does not run from south to
space to start building coal-fired power stations, as at Balkhash, north, as pipelines did in Soviet days to carry Central Asian gas
or refurbish older Soviet-era power stations at Ekibastuz and north to Russia, but from west to east, along Kazakhstan’s southern
elsewhere. borders with its gas-rich Central Asian neighbours. While the bulk
The decrease in demand for energy also provides extra time in of gas will be exported to China, up to 10bcm annually will be
which to complete construction of a north-south extension to the available for consumption in southern Kazakh homes, power stations
national power grid. This is needed to bring reliable power to the and factories.
more heavily populated south of the country where the two biggest What remains to be seen is whether the combination of tighter
cities, Almaty and Shymkent, are situated and where most people credit and reduced fears of power shortages will slow development
live. The fragility of the supply situation here was underlined of alternative energy sources, which were building momentum
in April when much of Almaty was plunged into darkness by before the global crisis struck the Kazakh economy, and especially
a breakdown in hydro-power supplies from Kyrgyzstan, whose its power-hungry metals, mining and cement sectors.
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3. ENERGY
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