Wind hybrid plants could deliver cheaper power than new coal in Kazakhstan, says Ember analyst

Your report finds that wind, solar and battery plants could meet 70% to 90% of a typical electricity demand profile. How should this finding be interpreted in the context of Kazakhstan’s overall electricity needs, and what role could these plants play in reducing the country’s reliance on coal and electricity imports?

The 70-90% is a plant-level result - it shows how closely a single hybrid power plant can match a typical demand profile for Kazakhstan hour by hour over 30 years and at what cost. It is not a share of national demand, and no single plant is meant to supply an entire city. What it shows is that a wind hybrid plant with solar and a small battery, built next to demand, can be more than an intermittent generator; it is a source of affordable and reliable supply, with capacity factors comparable to a conventional power plant, cheaper than new coal and faster to build.

That matters in a country where electricity demand is growing fast and a lot of new capacity is needed, and even more so now that data centres are arriving as a new source of demand. A gigawatt of data centres running around the clock would use close to 9 TWh a year, about 7% of today’s national demand.

Hybrid plants can be scaled up quickly across the country, close to where demand is, and can play a much bigger role in meeting that growth than current plans and targets assume. Unlike standalone wind or solar, such hybrid plants become a source of flexibility through the surplus they can curtail and the batteries they have. They are not a complete answer: Kazakhstan still has to build a more flexible, interconnected power system. But hybrid plants are part of that solution, not part of the problem.

Making wind and solar reliable in this way is not expensive and does not need a large battery. The hybrid plants that meet 70-90% of demand, depending on the site, deliver electricity at an average of $56 per MWh, and that figure already includes the cost of overbuilding capacity, curtailing the surplus and adding a small battery.

Ember estimates that electricity delivered by these hybrid plants could cost an average of $56 per megawatt-hour, compared with $70 to $170 for new coal power. What costs and assumptions underpin this comparison, and how might financing or changes in equipment prices affect the results?

The $56 per MWh is the cost per MWh actually delivered to the demand profile, so it already includes the output the plant curtails and the battery's roundtrip efficiency losses. The pure generation cost of the same plants is on average $45 per MWh - in line with the results from Kazakhstan's recent wind auctions and new project contracts.

The cost assumptions are 2026 prices adjusted for a cold climate. This includes 6 MW wind turbines at $6.15 million plus about $1.2 million per turbine for foundations, cabling, roads and civils and a further $50,000-150,000 for long-distance haulage from the turbine factory in Zhambyl, which brings the installed cost of wind to roughly $1,240 per kW; solar is assumed to cost $553 per kWac; a four-hour battery at $149 per kWh, replaced once after 15 years; a 30-year project life with equipment degradation; we also include a 126 MVA substation at the connection point to the costs.

We assumed no future cost declines, which is conservative given that global onshore wind and solar costs are still falling and battery costs have dropped by about 95% since 2010. A further 20-30% fall in costs in the next 5 years from $56/MWh towards $40-45 would be a realistic expectation - IRENA’s May 2026 analysis of firm renewable supply projects costs falling by roughly 30% by 2030 and around 40% by 2035. The $70-170 is the Eurasian Development Bank’s range for new ultra-supercritical coal.

Your modeling suggests that hybrid plants can meet more than 70% of winter demand at 13 of the 15 sites studied. How could Kazakhstan cover the remaining shortfalls, particularly during cold winter evenings and periods of low wind?

The expensive way to close these gaps is to further overbuild each plant, which pushes the cost from $56 to $87-91/MWh for the last few percentage points. The cheaper way is a system-level solution. This means overcoming both institutional and structural factors that currently limit the flexibility of Kazakhstan's power system, including modernising and expanding the current power transmission and distribution network, making existing conventional power plants more flexible, adding demand-side response, improving generation and demand forecasting, implementing more digital tools and improving market design that rewards and unlocks existing sources of flexibility that remain untapped.

The main condition is a market that pays for flexibility, not just energy. Coming back to our modelling results, low-wind periods rarely coincide across the 15 sites, further emphasizing the need for an interconnected power system. Adding the 15 sites together reduces the need for back-up. A single plant needs 81-91% of peak demand as back-up to cover all but the worst 1% of hours but the whole fleet of 15 sites needs only 48% of peak demand as back-up.

The report suggests that hybrid plants could be built close to demand centres and existing power lines. Which regions show the greatest potential, and what grid upgrades or other infrastructure would still be needed to connect these projects?

The strongest results are in the West and the North: the site near Zhanaozen meets 90% of demand, the site near Dzungarian Gate 88%. The South is weaker because its winter wind is lighter, but the most striking finding in our analysis is that every one of the 15 sites, chosen for proximity to a demand centre and an existing line rather than for wind, reaches at least 70%. Building these plants near demand avoids constructing long new lines to remote windy corridors, which saves significantly on grid expansion costs but it does not remove the need for a strong grid. Kazakhstan still needs the lines it has already planned to better connect its three power zones and build stronger interconnections with neighbouring countries.

What are the main regulatory and investment barriers to developing wind hybrid plants in Kazakhstan, and what specific measures should the government prioritise to support their growth beyond the 2030 renewable energy target?

There are three main barriers relevant for hybrid power plants. First, the lack of a specific renewables target beyond 2030. The 15% target is very likely to be reached, but it is less than four years away and most of the investment needed to get there is already locked in. Progress risks slowing considerably after 2030, especially considering signals from the grid operator, Kazakhstan Electricity Grid Operating Company (KEGOC), arguing for a pause on new renewable projects until flexible capacity catches up. A clear and ambitious post-2030 wind and solar target would be a clear signal to investors that the pipeline does not stop at 15%.

Second, the market pays plants for energy but not for flexibility. Some curtailment is not only economically acceptable - it is the key to making hybrid power plants a source of flexibility, but only if it is by design and paid for, not grid-ordered curtailment without compensation. This requires introducing Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs) that pay for flexibility and not just energy. Some international examples of such PPAs include India's firm and dispatchable supply contracts - the buyer contracts capacity that must meet demand for a set share of hours, and the project developers choose the optimal mix of wind, solar and storage to deliver this at the cheapest cost.

Third, the current storage rules are rigid regarding battery system size and do not open the full range of possible revenue streams for batteries, creating the risk that many batteries will remain underutilised. Since 2025 auction winners must build storage equal to 30% of plant capacity with two hours of energy. Our modelling results show that the optimal battery size varies depending on the site. They also show that if these batteries are only used to store its own project's wind and solar output, the battery remains severely underutilised.

To prevent this, the electricity market design needs to allow batteries to earn from balancing, capacity and ancillary services. China’s regulatory journey from storage mandates to new market mechanisms that allow revenue stacking is a potential source of key learning for Kazakhstan. The mandates began in 2017 and required new wind and solar projects to add storage but co-located batteries were used little, cycling just 80 times a year in 2022. Since 2022, China has opened spot, ancillary-service and capacity payments to batteries, supporting a notable increase in utilisation to 199 cycles per year in 2025. The mandate was scrapped in February 2025.

Looking ahead, what could Kazakhstan’s energy landscape look like by 2035 if the country makes full use of its wind resources, and what would this mean for households and businesses?

Wind and solar are a source of abundant cheap electricity and if their full potential is unlocked with smart hybrid power plants, they can power continued fast demand growth, including from new demand sources like data centres. While our study focuses on project-level economics and does not provide a national system-level analysis, a recent study by Agora Energiewende shows wind and solar rising to 23% of generation (not capacity) by 2035, with renewables as a whole above a third, while the system stays reliable and affordable.

For businesses, this means abundant affordable power that can come quicker and where they are growing that is also clean and makes them more competitive in the face of the EU carbon border charges for example. For households, it also means a more affordable source of electricity even as the national power system needs to build a lot of new power capacity quickly to meet the double challenge of fast demand growth and replacing aging infrastructure. With the right market design, hybrid power plants can scale quickly and provide affordable and reliable electricity and play a bigger role in meeting this challenge beyond 2030.

Earlier, Qazinform News Agency reported that Kazakhstan should welcome investment in large data centers while requiring operators to cover the cost of the additional power infrastructure their projects need. Dinara Berdigulova, a Doctor of International Affairs candidate at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, made the case in an exclusive interview.