Tajiks sink money into Sovietstyle dam

By Associated Press


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When Abdullo Bobokhonovs grandson was born in this Tajik village, he named the baby after a governmentordered hydroelectric dam and raised a small fortune to help fund it.

In the capital, Dushanbe, law student Alyona Arkhipova complains she was told she couldnt sit her exams unless she bought a share in the project.

One brims with pride while the other grumbles — two conflicting attitudes toward a $1.4 billion fundraising drive for a dam which the government touts as a cure for Tajikistans economic woes and energy gap, and which critics fear will bleed Central Asias poorest country dry.

The fundraising is driven by a propaganda offensive that harks back to when Tajikistan and four other Central Asian republics were part of the Soviet Union. And although there is some dissent, a visit to the former Soviet republic leaves the impression — even factoring in a possible fear of speaking openly — of a striking degree of acceptance and even enthusiasm for the Roghun dam.

This is the project of the century. When this plant begins operating, all of Tajikistans economic and political problems will be solved, said Bobokhonov, a 59yearold lawyer who, as family patriarch, got to choose the grandsons name — Roghunshoh, or King Roghun.

The family, which lives in a humble and tidy homestead in this tiny village in northern Tajikistan, also raised almost $1,200 for the dam.

The history of the Soviet Union was littered with similar grandiose projects aimed at bending nature to mans will. Now, 20 years after Tajikistan became independent, Roghun is held up as an object of national pride and a generationdefining path to a better future.

But the campaign compels Tajiks to spend meager savings on shares in Roghun at $23 each — a third of the average monthly salary and many, like the Bobokhonovs, are buying multiple shares. This raises concerns that the governments efforts could shatter livelihoods and stifle the countrys anemic economy.

It has also provoked rage in neighboring Uzbekistan, which fears the dam on the Vakhsh River could reduce the flow of water to its farmers.

Thats unlikely to bother many Tajiks. They tend to scorn objections from energyrich Uzbekistan, which has repeatedly cut off natural gas supplies to Tajikistan over delayed payments during freezing winter months.

The capitals main streets are adorned with banners and placards trumpeting Roghun. State television, which Tajiks rely on for news, devotes entire chunks of prime time to updates on the progress of the share sale. Countless billboards feature a hardhatwearing Emomali Rakhmon, Tajikistans ironfisted president since 1992.

Rakhmon vows that all investors in governmentissued Roghun stock will get their money back and more. There are hopes of selling surplus power to Afghanistan and Pakistan, but some worry that once electricity grids are laid out, they could be prey to militants in those countries.

It is far from clear when the dam will be completed, and the government has made only the vaguest promises about when its electricity will reach households or when it might generate profits.

The dam is expected to cost $2.2 billion and is designed to include six generating units with a capacity of 600 megawatts each. Around $175 million had been raised from the share sale by midMarch, which comes on top of the $120 million the government invested last year, but the project is still far short of the $600 million that Rakhmon says will be needed to complete the first phase by 2012.

There is no foreign investment in sight, and the World Bank is noncommittal, saying it will take around two years to study the dams technical feasibility and environmental impact.

The government insists that buying shares is completely voluntary, but Arkhipova, studying law at the TajikRussian Slavic University, tells a different story.

When the university term started, people in our class who didnt buy shares were quite simply denied the right to sit their exams, said Arkhipova, 23.

I wanted to avoid the same happening to me and I just wanted to do my test as normal, so I bought a share, she said.

Lowranking state workers have had portions of their salaries withheld to buy shares, and there have been media reports of some villagers being forced to sell cattle to raise money.

People talk about these things between themselves at the workplace, but they do not go to prosecutors out of fear of getting into trouble, said Sergei Romanov, a lawyer with the Dushanbebased Bureau on Human Rights and the Rule of Law.

Authorities promise the hydroelectric plant will bring an end to Tajikistans chronic electricity shortages.

The trauma of a blistering winter in 2007 is also still fresh in many minds, stirring support for the project. Frozen rivers reduced supply to the countrys main hydroelectric plant, leaving many regions without power and forcing Tajiks to endure some of the coldest weather on record without resort to electricity heaters. Hundreds of people died — many of them newborn babies in freezing maternity wards.

The Roghun project is meant in part to generate enough revenue to afford extra natural gas supplies when rivers freeze again.

It was designed to be worlds largest dam when the project started in the mid1970s, but it stalled as the Soviet Union collapsed, the economy went into chaos and a fiveyear civil war broke out.

More than half of Tajikistans largely Muslim population of 7 million is officially classified as poor. According to the International Monetary Fund, the remittances from migrant workers that keep the country afloat plunged by onethird last year. That and the fall in prices for the countrys main export commodities — aluminum and cotton — caused economic growth to shrink fourfold to 2 percent in 2009.

Economists believe the Roghun drive will only make matters worse in the immediate future.

The equity campaign may temporarily dampen growth in 2010 by up to one percentage point, with households reducing consumption... in order to purchase Roghun shares, the IMF said in a recent statement.

The Vakhsh begins in Tajikistan and flows into the AmuDarya river, the key irrigation source for Uzbekistans lucrative fruit, vegetable and cotton crops, and the neighbors complaint is being heard loud and clear.

In a letter to his Tajik counterpart, Uzbek Prime Minister Shavkat Mirziyoyev complained last month that tampering with river flows could disrupt the regions ecological balance and threaten the survival of millions of people.

The Tajik government has displayed complete disregard for our repeated statements on this issue, and it has continued to pursue construction of this facility without considering the possible consequences, Mirziyoyev said.

But Nasrullo Baimatov, a 56year old invalid retiree in the northern Tajik city of Khujand, is unmoved.

All this time, we have depended on Uzbekistan, he said. Once we build Roghun, we will rely on nobody.

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The news was announced this week by ENTSO-E, the agency that oversees the single, huge electricity grid connecting 25 European countries and which recently synchronized with Ukraine to bolster regional resilience. It said that variations in the frequency of the AC caused by imbalances between supply and demand on the grid have been messing with the clocks. The imbalance is itself caused by a political argument between Serbia and Kosovo. “This is a very sensitive dispute that materializes in the energy issues,” Susanne Nies, a spokesperson for ENTSO-E, told The Verge.

Essentially, after Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008, there were long negotiations over custody of utilities like telecoms and electricity infrastructure. As part of the ongoing agreements (Serbia still does not recognize Kosovo as a sovereign state), four Serb-majority districts in the north of Kosovo stopped paying for electricity. Kosovo initially covered this by charging the rest of the country more, but last December, it decided it had had enough and stopped paying. This led to an imbalance: the Kosovan districts were still using electricity, but no one was paying to put it on the grid.

This might sound weird, but it’s because electricity grids work on a system of supply and demand, where surging consumption has even triggered a Nordic grid blockade in response to constrained flows. As Stewart Larque of the UK’s National Grid explains, you want to keep the same amount of electricity going onto the grid from power stations as the amount being taken off by homes and businesses. “Think of it like driving a car up a hill at a constant speed,” Larque told The Verge. “You need to carefully balance acceleration with gravity.” (The UK itself has not been affected by these variations because it runs its own grid.)

 

“THEY ARE FREE-RIDING ON THE SYSTEM.”

This balancing act is hugely complex and requires constant monitoring of supply and demand and communication between electricity companies across Europe, and growing cyber risks have spurred a renewed focus on protecting the U.S. power grid among operators worldwide. The dispute between Kosovo and Serbia, though, has put this system out of whack, as the two governments have been refusing to acknowledge what the other is doing.

“The Serbians [in Kosovo] have, according to our sources, not been paying for their electricity. So they are free-riding on the system,” says Nies.

The dispute came to a temporary resolution on Tuesday, when the Kosovan government stepped up to the plate and agreed to pay a fee of €1 million for the electricity used by the Serb-majority municipalities. “It is a temporary decision but as such saves our network functionality,” said Kosovo’s prime minister Ramush Haradinaj. In the longer term, though, a new agreement will need to be reached.

There have been rumors that the increase in demand from northern Kosovo was caused by cryptocurrency miners moving into the area to take advantage of the free electricity. But according to ENTSO-E, this is not the case. “It is absolutely unrelated to cryptocurrency,” Nies told The Verge. “There’s a lot of speculation about this, and it’s absolutely unrelated.” Representatives of Serbia’s power operator, EMS, refused to answer questions on this.

For now, “Kosovo is in balance again,” says Nies. “They are producing enough [electricity] to supply the population. The next step is to take the system back to normal, which will take several weeks.” In other words, time will return to normal for Europeans — if they remember to change their clocks, even as the U.S. power grid sees more blackouts than other developed nations.

 

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