BAKU, Azerbaijan, April 26. The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has begun exploring opportunities to accelerate the retirement of coal and other fossil fuel plants in Kazakhstan and replace or repurpose them with clean energy under the bank’s Energy Transition Mechanism (ETM) program, press service of the ADB told Trend.
Kazakhstan becomes the fifth country to begin working with ADB on ETM, following Indonesia, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Viet Nam.
Following a request from the Ministry of Energy of Kazakhstan, ADB has initiated a pre-feasibility study to help the government identify coal-fired and combined heat-power plants that could be potential candidates for accelerated retirement. ADB has provided a $225,000 grant for the study, which will analyze the current policy and regulatory environment in the Central Asian nation.
Kazakhstan is a major consumer of coal with some 25 billion tons of reserves estimated to be the eighth largest worldwide. About 70 percent of the nation’s electricity is produced from coal while energy-related activity, including heat and electricity production, accounted for more than 80 percent of the country’s total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
In February, President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev approved Kazakhstan’s long-term decarbonization strategy wherein the government aims to reduce GHG emissions by 15 percent by 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060.
ADB’s ETM is a scalable, replicable program that uses concessional and commercial capital to retire or repurpose existing coal and other fossil fuel plants on an accelerated schedule, replacing them with clean power capacity. ETM is one of many ADB initiatives that can help Asia and the Pacific mitigate the worst impacts of climate change such as extreme sea level rises and destructive weather events.