Central Asia is building a new energy system. Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan are rapidly expanding solar and wind generation and battery storage, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan are expanding their hydropower capacity, and governments across the region are investing in stronger cross-border electricity connections. Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan are also both moving ahead with nuclear power.
These projects are usually discussed as separate parts of the region’s energy transition, but they are increasingly connected by single, critical variable: water.
Climate change is making Central Asia’s hydrology less predictable just as electricity demand is growing. Drought can constrain hydropower, extreme heat can increase power demand, irrigation systems consume large amounts of electricity, and new generation assets must be able to operate for decades under water conditions that may look very different from historical averages.
This creates a challenge, but also an opportunity. A more integrated and flexible Central Asian power system could reduce not only the cost of the energy transition, but also the region’s exposure to water shocks.
Five Energy Systems, One Regional Opportunity
Central Asia does not have a single energy model. Kazakhstan remains strongly dependent on thermal and coal-fired generation. Uzbekistan’s system is still largely gas-based, although solar, wind, and battery storage are expanding rapidly. Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan rely heavily on hydropower, while Turkmenistan relies predominantly on natural gas.
These differences are often treated as vulnerabilities, but they can also create complementarity. Hydropower and reservoirs can provide flexibility to systems with growing shares of variable renewable energy. Solar and wind can reduce dependence on hydrological conditions. Thermal generation can provide firm capacity while storage expands. Cross-border electricity trade can allow countries to draw on these different resources rather than each trying to maintain an isolated system capable of meeting every contingency on its own.
The economic case for integration is already substantial. Modeling by Agora Energiewende and the University of Central Asia suggests that deeper integration between Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan, combined with stronger transmission and greater renewable deployment, could reduce annual system costs by around $3.5 billion, or 18 percent, by 2035 compared with current plans.
The World Bank’s Regional Electricity Market Interconnectivity and Trade (REMIT) program is moving in the same direction. It aims to increase annual regional electricity trade to at least 15,000 GWh, expand transmission capacity to 16 GW, and enable up to 9 GW of clean energy.
But interconnection alone is not resilience. This was demonstrated in dramatic fashion last month when Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan all reported blackouts on August 14. The cause of the regional blackout appears to have been the sudden shutdown of two units at the Toktogul Hydroelectric Station in Kyrgyzstan which disturbed the flow of power through the unified grid. Kyrgyz authorities, however, disputed that the problem at Toktogul was responsible for the cascade of outages in neighboring countries.
Regardless, the lesson stands that interconnection – on its own – does not necessarily result in resilience. Solar peaks can occur at similar times across neighboring countries, while drought can reduce hydropower output just as extreme heat raises electricity demand. Regional integration therefore needs to be accompanied by storage, flexible generation, demand response, stronger grids, and coordinated operating rules. These can also provide countries with greater flexibility when another critical resource becomes constrained: water.
Historical Averages Are Becoming Less Useful
As I argued in a previous article for The Diplomat, “Central Asia’s Water Crisis Is Becoming a Regional Economic Risk,” water scarcity is no longer only an environmental issue. It is increasingly an economic, infrastructure, and regional-cooperation risk. The World Bank reports that Central Asia has lost around 30 percent of its glacier surface area over the past 60 years. For Uzbekistan, it projects water availability to fall by 30-40 percent while irrigation demand will rise by about 25 percent.
Yet describing the problem simply as “less water” misses an important part of what climate change is doing to the region. Research on the Amu Darya Basin indicates that accelerated glacier melt and changing precipitation can temporarily sustain or increase flows in some periods, even as seasonality, year-to-year variability, and extremes change substantially.
For energy planners, that distinction matters. A reservoir, hydropower plant, nuclear facility, transmission system, or irrigation network built today will operate for decades. The relevant question is therefore not simply how much water Central Asia has now, but how reliably that water will arrive, when it will arrive, and what competing demands it will face over the decades-long lifetime of the infrastructure being built today.
Hydropower illustrates the problem particularly clearly. Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan depend heavily on hydropower, and their reservoirs can provide storage and balancing services to a regional system incorporating more solar and wind. But reservoir operation also distributes costs and benefits across borders. Upstream countries may prefer to retain water for winter electricity generation, while downstream agricultural systems depend heavily on summer releases. During droughts, reconciling those priorities becomes more difficult.
Water management is therefore not an external environmental constraint on the energy transition. It is increasingly part of energy security itself.
The Water-Energy Relationship
Water is not just critical to Central Asia’s energy systems, but those systems require energy to operate, too. According to World Bank project documentation, around 2.4 million hectares of Uzbekistan’s irrigated land depend on pumping, and roughly 1,700 pumping stations consume about 7.2 TWh of electricity annually.
Modernizing pumping stations, reducing losses, and improving irrigation efficiency can simultaneously reduce pressure on scarce water resources and electricity demand. In practical terms, water efficiency can itself become an energy-security investment. Put more simply: water efficiency is also energy policy.
But the reverse is equally important: energy flexibility can become a form of water resilience.
Uzbekistan generated 10.5 TWh of electricity from solar and wind in 2025 and is rapidly expanding battery storage, with a further 884 MW of storage scheduled for commissioning in 2026.
Variable renewable generation cannot replace every form of firm capacity on its own. But that is not the relevant comparison. What matters is whether a diversified portfolio of solar, wind, hydropower, storage, flexible generation, efficiency, stronger grids, and electricity trade leaves the system less dependent on any single source of fuel, river regime, or generating facility.
Consider a dry year in which hydropower output falls. In a poorly diversified system, governments have fewer options: increase fossil generation, reduce electricity supply, or place greater pressure on reservoir operations. In a more flexible regional system, imports, solar and wind generation, storage, flexible generation, and demand response can absorb part of the shock.
While none of this creates more water, it does something important all the same: a more flexible electricity system expands the choices available to water managers. Instead of optimizing reservoirs exclusively around immediate electricity shortages, governments have more room to consider irrigation requirements, ecological flows, drought reserves, and downstream needs. Conversely, more efficient irrigation and pumping reduce stress on the power system.
The water-energy nexus is therefore not only a story of two sectors competing for scarce resources. Under the right conditions, investments in one can increase the resilience of the other.
And What About Nuclear?
The same water-aware approach should apply to Central Asia’s emerging nuclear plans. Nuclear power can provide firm low-carbon electricity and diversify generation portfolios. Those characteristics are attractive to countries facing rapidly growing electricity demand while trying to reduce reliance on fossil fuels, descriptions that fit both Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Both countries are pursuing the construction of their first modern nuclear power plants.
But nuclear projects are long-lived infrastructure. Their contribution to resilience therefore needs to be assessed against future, rather than historical, conditions. That means considering future water availability and cooling requirements alongside extreme heat, construction timelines, lifecycle costs, safety and waste arrangements, financing exposure, and alternative portfolios capable of providing comparable system services.
Water is not, by itself, an argument for or against nuclear power in Central Asia. It is one of the variables that should determine whether a particular project strengthens the resilience of the wider system. The more useful question is not whether nuclear power is inherently compatible with the region’s energy transition, but under what technical, financial, and environmental conditions it contributes to a system capable of functioning under greater climatic and hydrological uncertainty.
Stop Negotiating Only Over Cubic Meters
A more integrated energy system can create flexibility, but infrastructure alone will not resolve Central Asia’s water tensions. The institutional question is equally important. Regional water negotiations have traditionally focused heavily on allocation: how much water should each country receive? Benefit-sharing offers a different way of looking at the same rivers.
A reservoir does more than hold a particular volume of water. Depending on how it is operated, it can generate electricity, regulate seasonal flows, support irrigation, maintain drought reserves, reduce flood risks, and create economic value through regional electricity trade. The relevant question therefore becomes not only who receives how many cubic meters, but what services coordinated management provides — and how the costs and benefits should be distributed.
There are precedents outside of Central Asia. Under the treaty-based framework of the Organisation pour la Mise en Valeur du fleuve Sénégal (OMVS), Mali, Mauritania, and Senegal jointly own major infrastructure including the Manantali Dam. Its benefits include hydropower, irrigation, navigation, and water regulation. The model cannot simply be transplanted to Central Asia, but Manantali demonstrates an important principle: cooperation can be organized around measurable infrastructure and regulation services rather than around the idea that one country is “selling” another country water or energy.
Central Asia may soon have an opportunity to test that principle. The Kambarata-1 hydropower project in Kyrgyzstan is being developed through a trilateral partnership with Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. This creates a potential framework for connecting joint investment with agreed reservoir regimes, electricity purchases, drought reserves, and measurable downstream services.
Countries could jointly model how different operating regimes affect electricity generation, irrigation reliability, ecosystem flows, and drought resilience. They could then negotiate co-financing, electricity contracts, or service payments around the additional benefits created by coordinated operation. That would represent a significant change in regional water diplomacy: from negotiating primarily over scarcity toward negotiating over value.
Water Security Is Energy Security
Central Asia does not lack regional institutions or international initiatives. Mechanisms for water allocation and electricity coordination already exist, while programs such as the Central Asia Water and Energy Program and new World Bank-supported regional projects are intended to strengthen infrastructure, data, water management, and cross-border cooperation. The harder task is translating dialogue and modeling into shared drought procedures, coordinated infrastructure decisions, investable projects, and predictable operating rules.
The economic stakes are significant. A July 2026 World Bank regional analysis put the cost of insufficient cooperation among national water systems at more than $4.5 billion annually. Meanwhile, the REMIT program is designed to deepen regional electricity connectivity and trade, creating a platform for larger long-term economic gains from integration.
Central Asia’s energy transition will therefore not succeed simply by adding low-carbon capacity. It will succeed if the resulting system remains reliable during heatwaves and droughts, affordable for consumers, compatible with ecosystem needs, and resilient across shared river basins.
Water security is not an argument against the energy transition; it is a condition for designing it well.
The deeper opportunity is to move beyond negotiating only over cubic meters of water and toward negotiating over the wider benefits that water and energy cooperation can create. If Central Asian states can translate that principle into shared evidence, measurable services, joint investment, and predictable operating arrangements, water may become not only a constraint on the region’s energy transition, but one of the strongest incentives for deeper regional cooperation.
Disclosure: This article has been supported by the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES). The views and opinions expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect those of the FES.