In Kazakhstan, the ordeal of a city that remained without heating for more than a week in temperatures that dropped to -30°C sparked a wave of anger and highlighted the deplorable state of energy infrastructure dating from the Soviet era.
The authorities announced Thursday the end of a state of emergency which had been decreed on November 28, the day following a malfunction in a thermal power station which deprived several districts of electricity and heating.
But the descent into hell of Ekibastouz, a city of around 150,000 inhabitants in the north of this Central Asian country, illustrates the consequences that massive power cuts can have in the middle of winter, at a time when several European nations fear energy shortages due to the war in Ukraine.
Stalactites in the apartments
Images broadcast by the Kazakh media showed stalactites forming in apartments, while chilled residents burned what they found in the street to warm themselves in the freezing cold. Teams of workers worked day and night to repair the pipes that had burst under the effect of the frost, heating jerrycans with blowtorches to prevent their contents from freezing.
If the situation is gradually improving, the ordeal of Ekibastouz, which was during the Stalinist terror a huge labor camp where the famous writer and Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn was imprisoned, aroused national anger.
The popular singer Dimach Koudaïbergen, 3.8 million subscribers on Instagramdemanded that those responsible for this tragedy “serve their sentence in a prison without heating” and thus pay for the “tears of mothers left in the street”.
Facing outrage on social media, President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, who was nearly overthrown nearly a year ago by deadly riots, sacked the local governor and dispatched several senior officials to the scene. Heaters and blankets were sent from other regions of Kazakhstan. And even in neighboring Kyrgyzstan, where the energy situation is hardly more enviable, funds have been collected in support.
This episode adds to an already long list of accidents in thermal infrastructure in Kazakhstan, a country five times the size of France. “The first time is a coincidence, the second, a coincidence, and the third, the rule”told Agence France-Presse Jakyp Khaïrouchev, an electrical engineer and business manager.
Nationalization of power plants envisaged
Inherited from the Soviet Union, the energy system remains dilapidated, despite investments. According to the government, thermal power stations have an average age of sixty-one years. According to Mr. Khairushev, “more than 1,000 emergency shutdowns of thermal power plants took place in 2022, i.e. nearly 75,000 hours”. The expert explains that the explosion in Kazakhstan in recent years of cryptocurrency mining, with very power-hungry computers, has increased the strain on energy infrastructure.
President Tokayev lamented that hydrocarbon-rich Kazakhstan was “one of the most energy intensive countries in the world” and that it has to import electricity, especially from Russia. Forced to react, he now claims to consider the nationalization of certain assets, while twenty-two of the thirty-seven thermal power stations belong to the private sector.
Regarding the Ekibastouz plant, the government has passed on its owner, the oligarch Alexander Klebanov, the fifteenth richest man in Kazakhstan according to Forbes. But he replied that he had “already alerted the government to the non-profitability of the plant” and invoked “the impossibility of raising tariffs”.
