Blame Game Ensues as Regional Blackout Hits Central Asia

Eight regions across southern and northern Kazakhstan were hit by large-scale power outages on August 14 amid a larger blackout that affected Central Asia’s shared power grid for several hours and forced many throughout the region to confront a range of power failure-related issues.In Almaty, for example, mountain-goers were left stranded in cable cars for an hour and a half when the Shymbulak ski resort lost power, while Ye’s hotly anticipated Friday-night show at the city’s Central Stadium had to be postponed a day amid the chaos of blackout-linked traffic jams and an inopportunely timed thunderstorm.Elsewhere in Central Asia, local media reported widespread power outages, from major population centers in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan to more rural localities in Uzbekistan close to the Tajik border.Blame GameIt did not take long for finger-pointing to begin at an official level, with Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan effectively blaming each other for the blackout within hours of it occurring.KEGOC, Kazakhstan’s national electric grid operator, was first to assign fault, saying in the evening of August 14 that the country’s North-East-South power line had been overloaded after several power generators shut down in Kyrgyzstan at the major Toktogul hydropower plant.Kyrgyzstan’s ministry of energy then responded by reporting that the regional blackout had been caused by an outage on a high-voltage power line in Kazakhstan, before later issuing a separate statement on August 17 that admitted Toktogul had “briefly shut down” on Friday while maintaining that it was “incorrect to hold the Kyrgyz system responsible” for the regional grid failures.Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, for their part, were more evasive.According to local media, Tashkent’s ministry of energy said on August 14 that the blackout had been caused by disruptions in the power grid of a “neighboring country,” but declined to specify which one.Dushanbe, meanwhile, merely announced that no “exact cause” had yet been determined.The blame game also continued outside of official circles.Almaty residents, for example, took to social media to half-jokingly accuse the artist formerly known as Kanye West and his enormous globe-shaped stage of causing the city’s power failure, but more serious criticism was offered too.Most prominently, former KEGOC chairman Asset Nauryzbayev offered a broadside against the grid operator for not having learned the lessons of similar previous regional power outages, and for having turned a “minor [grid] failure” into “total chaos.” “What has happened is now clear. [Our] emergency response failed to activate, … causing a cascade of power line outages across all the countries [of Central Asia],” Nauryzbayev wrote, before praising Kyrgyzstan for “switching off operations from the regional grid” and Uzbekistan for “activating its battery energy storage system” during the crisis.Here We Go AgainAs Nauryzbayev noted, this was not the first time in recent memory that Central Asia has been hit by a large-scale simultaneous blackout.In January 2022, millions of residents of Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan were left without electricity and lost access to tap water and heating after a regional power line was disconnected.That same year, 11 months later, the latter two countries were also affected by localized grid outages — a common occurrence in Kazakhstan — after several thermal power plants failed amid a particularly cold Winter.Since then, despite Central Asia’s unified energy system and much of its physical infrastructure dating back to the Soviet era, there has been a renewed trend towards increased regional energy cooperation.Tajikistan reconnected to the Central Asian shared grid in 2024, paving the way for the Asian Development Bank to announce later that year that a new 22 km, 500-kilovolt power line would be built to strengthen transmission to neighboring Uzbekistan.More ambitiously, in January 2026, the World Bank announced a 10-year, $1 billion initiative called REMIT that is intended to create a formal regional electricity market, improve grid reliability and transmission between partnering countries.Judging by the events of last week, the success of future regional inter-governmental energy partnership remains to be seen.As evidenced by several reports by domestic and international media, the most visible official response to last week’s power outages was blame trading.Sign up for our English-language newsletter.