All three are groping about for solutions, including nuclear power. Kyrgyzstan became the latest to move toward the atom in January when it announced plans to build a small nuclear plant with Russia.

Just days later, a short circuit at Uzbekistan’s Syrdarya thermal power plant demonstrated a big reason why. The fault on Jan 25 resulted in the shutdown of six of the plant’s units, according to the Kazakhstan Electricity Grid Operating Company (Kegoc).

This meant that Uzbekistan had to raise the amount of energy it took from the unified grid it shares with Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, leading to a power surge that overloaded Kazakhstan’s transmission system, plunging the region into a blackout.

The shared grid, known as the Central Asian Power System (CAPS), was set up in Soviet times as a way of ensuring consistent power supplies across the region, taking into account seasonal variations in generating capacity.

In winter, Kazakhstan’s and Uzbekistan’s thermal power plants feed energy into the grid to supply Kyrgyzstan, which puts electricity back into the grid in the summer via its hydropower plants.

The system also connects northern Kazakhstan with Russia’s grid, which can be called upon to boost supplies.

But as demand for electricity rises, especially in the colder winter months, the creaking system is being pushed to its limits.

In Kazakhstan alone, electricity consumption grew by more than 6% in 2021, according to figures released by Kegoc. Even though the country is a major producer of fossil fuels, this led to shortfalls because aging plants could not keep up.

Part of the increase in demand has been attributed to cryptocurrency miners relocating to Kazakhstan from China, which banned digital currency mining last May.

In August, Kazakhstan accounted for nearly a fifth of the world’s hash rate – a measure of processing power used to mine cryptocurrency, according to the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance.

Cryptocurrency mining requires a huge amount of energy and, at the end of last year, Kegoc began cutting off supplies to legal miners despite earlier assurances to the contrary. The day before the blackout, Kegoc announced that the supply to miners was being suspended for a week.

Alan Dorjiyev, president of the Data Center Industry and Blockchain Association of Kazakhstan, feels that miners have been unfairly scapegoated.

“The problem with electricity is not the miners,” he said. “Our whole system is on the brink,” he told Kazakh news agency informburo.kz.

The cost of electricity is heavily subsidised in Kazakhstan, which in turn means that the whole power generation industry is underfunded and struggles to make the necessary upgrades.

But the authorities hands are tied as any moves to hike fuel prices would likely be met with pushback.

Recent attempts to sell liquefied petroleum gas at market rates backfired in early January, sparking unprecedented unrest that started peacefully but ended with at least 227 dead and thousands arrested, according to official figures.

The Usaid-led Central Asia Regional Electricity Market (Carem) project is looking to provide expertise to help with the process of rehabilitating the region’s grid, but significant obstacles remain.

“The cost in Uzbekistan is high because it’s not just about adding flexible energy generation that’s absolutely necessary, but you need to overhaul the entire system and grid, change dispatch disciplines, change dispatch intervals, among other necessary changes,” Oleg Ryaskov, Carem’s deputy chief, said in a programme update last November.

By the end of this decade, Uzbekistan’s energy ministry predicts that annual demand for electricity in Central Asia’s most populous country will almost double to around 117 billion kilowatt-hours.

To help meet that need, Uzbekistan is building a nuclear power plant set to be fully commissioned by 2030, with the first reactors online by 2028. The facility, which will have four reactors, is expected to supply just under 20% of the country’s power needs.

An International Atomic Energy Agency review last year commended Uzbekistan’s “substantive progress in the development of its nuclear power infrastructure”, while also recommending that the country adhere to international safety conventions to which it is not yet a party.

“The government should ensure a consistent and complete national legal framework for nuclear safety and nuclear security by consolidating and strengthening legislation,” the IAEA added.

In January, meanwhile, Kyrgyzstan and Russian state nuclear company Rosatom announced their plans to cooperate on the small nuclear plant.

“The construction of a plant like this in Kyrgyzstan will not only improve the country’s energy independence, but also contribute to the public’s quality of life and the development of R&D and technology potential in Central Asia as a whole,” Rosatom Director-General Alexey Likhachev said in a news release.

Kazakhstan, home to the world’s largest uranium reserves, is also looking into the nuclear option as it aims to ensure its future energy needs.

“We clearly see the need to build a nuclear power plant in order to provide our population and our economy with electricity,” Magzum Mirzagaliyev, then the Kazakh energy minister, said in late December according to media reports.

Sites under consideration include Ulken, near Almaty, and Kurchatov in the northeast.

The latter is a city named after the Soviet nuclear physicist Igor Kurchatov and was once the centre of operations for the adjoining Semipalatinsk Test Site – making it a symbol of the Soviet nuclear weapons testing that still looms large in the Kazakh psyche.

Alongside the move to nuclear power, the region has immense, untapped resources of renewable energy including hydro, solar and wind power. But introducing renewables into the grid presents another set of problems.

By its nature, the energy generated by renewables varies with climatic conditions and needs constant monitoring to ensure a consistent flow.

Uzbekistan is taking other steps to increase its energy security. In January, it announced it had halted natural gas exports with immediate effect. Gas production has been falling in recent years and shortages in the domestic market have led to sporadic protests.

So the government stopped the exports, which were mainly going to China.

Tashkent plans to direct its gas to domestic consumers. It is also looking to move up the value chain and reduce reliance on imports. In December it opened its first plant to turn the gas into liquid fuels such as kerosene, diesel and LPG.