Crossroads Asia | Economy | Environment | Central Asia

Central Asia’s Energy Transition Depends on Water Security

A more integrated and flexible power system could give Central Asian states greater room to manage drought, hydropower volatility, and competing demands for water.

Central Asia is building a new energy system. Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan are rapidly expanding solar and wind generation and battery storage, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan are expanding their hydropower capacity, and governments across the region are investing in stronger cross-border electricity connections. Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan are also both moving ahead with nuclear power.

These projects are usually discussed as separate parts of the region’s energy transition, but they are increasingly connected by single, critical variable: water.

Climate change is making Central Asia’s hydrology less predictable just as electricity demand is growing. Drought can constrain hydropower, extreme heat can increase power demand, irrigation systems consume large amounts of electricity, and new generation assets must be able to operate for decades under water conditions that may look very different from historical averages.

This creates a challenge, but also an opportunity. A more integrated and flexible Central Asian power system could reduce not only the cost of the energy transition, but also the region’s exposure to water shocks.

Five Energy Systems, One Regional Opportunity

Central Asia does not have a single energy model. Kazakhstan remains strongly dependent on thermal and coal-fired generation. Uzbekistan’s system is still largely gas-based, although solar, wind, and battery storage are expanding rapidly. Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan rely heavily on hydropower, while Turkmenistan relies predominantly on natural gas.

These differences are often treated as vulnerabilities, but they can also create complementarity. Hydropower and reservoirs can provide flexibility to systems with growing shares of variable renewable energy. Solar and wind can reduce dependence on hydrological conditions. Thermal generation can provide firm capacity while storage expands. Cross-border electricity trade can allow countries to draw on these different resources rather than each trying to maintain an isolated system capable of meeting every contingency on its own.

The economic case for integration is already substantial. Modeling by Agora Energiewende and the University of Central Asia suggests that deeper integration between Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan, combined with stronger transmission and greater renewable deployment, could reduce annual system costs by around $3.5 billion, or 18 percent, by 2035 compared with current plans.

The World Bank’s Regional Electricity Market Interconnectivity and Trade (REMIT) program is moving in the same direction. It aims to increase annual regional electricity trade to at least 15,000 GWh, expand transmission capacity to 16 GW, and enable up to 9 GW of clean energy.

But interconnection alone is not resilience. This was demonstrated in dramatic fashion last month when Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan all reported blackouts on August 14. The cause of the regional blackout appears to have been the sudden shutdown of two units at the Toktogul Hydroelectric Station in Kyrgyzstan which disturbed the flow of power through the unified grid. Kyrgyz authorities, however, disputed that the problem at Toktogul was responsible for the cascade of outages in neighboring countries. 

Regardless, the lesson stands that interconnection – on its own – does not necessarily result in resilience. Solar peaks can occur at similar times across neighboring countries, while drought can reduce hydropower output just as extreme heat raises electricity demand. Regional integration therefore needs to be accompanied by storage, flexible generation, demand response, stronger grids, and coordinated operating rules. These can also provide countries with greater flexibility when another critical resource becomes constrained: water.

Historical Averages Are Becoming Less Useful

As I argued in a previous article for The Diplomat, “Central Asia’s Water Crisis Is Becoming a Regional Economic Risk,” water scarcity is no longer only an environmental issue. It is increasingly an economic, infrastructure, and regional-cooperation risk. The World Bank reports that Central Asia has lost around 30 percent of its glacier surface area over the past 60 years. For Uzbekistan, it projects water availability to fall by 30-40 percent while irrigation demand will rise by about 25 percent.

Yet describing the problem simply as “less water” misses an important part of what climate change is doing to the region. Research on the Amu Darya Basin indicates that accelerated glacier melt and changing precipitation can temporarily sustain or increase flows in some periods, even as seasonality, year-to-year variability, and extremes change substantially.

For energy planners, that distinction matters. A reservoir, hydropower plant, nuclear facility, transmission system, or irrigation network built today will operate for decades. The relevant question is therefore not simply how much water Central Asia has now, but how reliably that water will arrive, when it will arrive, and what competing demands it will face over the decades-long lifetime of the infrastructure being built today.

Hydropower illustrates the problem particularly clearly. Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan depend heavily on hydropower, and their reservoirs can provide storage and balancing services to a regional system incorporating more solar and wind. But reservoir operation also distributes costs and benefits across borders. Upstream countries may prefer to retain water for winter electricity generation, while downstream agricultural systems depend heavily on summer releases. During droughts, reconciling those priorities becomes more difficult.

Water management is therefore not an external environmental constraint on the energy transition. It is increasingly part of energy security itself.

The Water-Energy Relationship 

Water is not just critical to Central Asia’s energy systems, but those systems require energy to operate, too. According to World Bank project documentation, around 2.4 million hectares of Uzbekistan’s irrigated land depend on pumping, and roughly 1,700 pumping stations consume about 7.2 TWh of electricity annually.

Modernizing pumping stations, reducing losses, and improving irrigation efficiency can simultaneously reduce pressure on scarce water resources and electricity demand. In practical terms, water efficiency can itself become an energy-security investment. Put more simply: water efficiency is also energy policy.

But the reverse is equally important: energy flexibility can become a form of water resilience.

Uzbekistan generated 10.5 TWh of electricity from solar and wind in 2025 and is rapidly expanding battery storage, with a further 884 MW of storage scheduled for commissioning in 2026.

Variable renewable generation cannot replace every form of firm capacity on its own. But that is not the relevant comparison. What matters is whether a diversified........

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