Kazakhstan must achieve sustained electricity surplus by 2029, says President Tokayev
Kazakhstan must increase electricity generation to meet demand from industry, construction, agriculture, and the digital economy. President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev set out this priority in his state-of-the-nation address, Qazinform News Agency reports.
Kazakhstan produces 123 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity. For a country with growing industrial, construction, and agro-industrial sectors and, above all, plans to fully digitalize its economy and introduce artificial intelligence into every sphere of public life, which will require building data centers, this level of electricity generation is woefully inadequate. We therefore face a fundamentally strategic task: to achieve a sustained electricity surplus by 2029, the Head of State said.
To achieve this goal, he said, Kazakhstan must build new power plants and transmission lines and modernize existing ones. It must also develop “clean” coal-fired generation and pay particular attention to renewable energy, especially solar power plants.
The Head of State also said the government must update the country’s unified long-term energy balance through 2035.
Earlier, Qazinform News Agency reported that President Tokayev had announced the “People’s Construction” program. He described it as Kazakhstan’s largest infrastructure initiative.