Baku, Azerbaijan, June 28
By Fakhri Vakilov - Trend:
Uzbekistan and Afghanistan plan to sign a ten-year contract for the supply of electricity on a take-or-pay basis by the end of October this year, Trend reports via Uzbek media.
The new power line Surkhan - Puli-Khumri, which is being built by Uzbekistan and Afghanistan, will increase the supply of electricity to six billion kWh per year.
The total cost of the project is $150 million, of which $118 million is invested by the Afghan side, and $32 million by the Uzbek side.
"Recently, a key decision was taken that we will build a 500 kV line from Surkhandarya to Afghanistan, which will allow us to export three times more electricity than we are doing now," Deputy Minister of Energy Sherzod Khodzhayev of Uzbekistan said at a press conference in Tashkent.
"At the same time, funds for building the line for Afghan side will be allocated by the Asian Development Bank (ADB). ADB took an exceptional step - they agreed that we should build this line without holding any international tenders,” he added.
“The only condition of ADB on financing the construction was that the Afghan side should conclude a ten-year take-or-pay contract with Uzbekistan. So, even if Afghan side says that they do not need electricity, they will have to pay," Khodzhayev said.
According to him, the parties also agreed that Uzbekistan will have the opportunity to sell electricity purchased from other countries to Afghanistan, in case it does not have enough electricity of its own.
The agreement on the construction of power transmission lines was signed during the visit of head of Afghanistan Ashraf Ghani to Uzbekistan in December 2017. The project payback period is 12 years. The capacity of the line will be 1000 MW which will make it possible to transmit over 24 million kW / h per day.
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