A major power outage that left Kazakhstan’s commercial hub Almaty and surrounding southern regions without electricity on August 14 was triggered by an incident at the Toktogul hydropower plant in neighbouring Kyrgyzstan, according to Kazakh officials.
Kazakh Energy Minister Erlan Akkenzhenov said the disruption began after the first and second generating units at the Kyrgyz hydroelectric facility shut down unexpectedly. The sudden loss of 625 megawatts of generation caused critical power flow imbalances and transmission line overloads across Central Asia’s interconnected grid, forcing grid operator KEGOC to implement emergency load-shedding exceeding 2,800 megawatts.
KEGOC restored normal domestic electricity supply within two and a half hours, but authorities in Astana have formed a state commission to review the incident. Investigators are analysing the performance of automated grid protection systems to determine why the cross-border disruption caused such extensive disconnections across the metropolitan area and nearby industrial zones.
Kyrgyzstan’s Energy Ministry has contested Astana’s assessment, maintaining that the Toktogul facility was not responsible for the wider blackout and that the power cuts were caused by domestic protective relay systems in the affected regions.
