[Translation provided by the Business & Human Rights Resource Center]

Geopolitics and money. Why Kambar-Ata-1 and VNK will not be built, 21 January 2016

The project for the construction of the Kambar-Ata HPP-1 and the Upper Naryn Cascade of HPP has geopolitical nature, the chances of its implementation are very small, Mars Sariev, an expert at the Dalil Plus analytical club, believes.

The Supreme Council of Kyrgyzstan...approved the denunciation of an agreement with Russian investors on the construction of the Kambar-Ata HPP-1 and the Upper Naryn cascade of HPP. At the end of last year, President Almazbek Atambayev said that in the current economic conditions, Russia would not be able to fulfill its construction obligations. After that, the government initiated the denunciation of the agreement...

Mars Sariev, an expert of the Dalil Plus analytical club, believes that the construction of the VNK and the Kambar-Ata HPP-1 was originally a political project.

"The high seismicity of the area, both technically and geopolitically, are the main reasons why the project was initially erroneous. Do not forget that the construction was designed in the USSR, it aroused general regional interest, and with the independence of the Central Asian states, this aspect disappeared, and it is unlikely that the heads of the region will be able to agree on projects of such dimensions in the near future," Sariev said...

...[A]ccording to the expert's opinion, electricity is vital for Kyrgyzstan, so a way out can be found in the construction of small HPPs, and Russia could act here as an investor as a partner in the EEU.

Niyaz Irsaliev, director of the Tegirmentinskiye HPP enterprise, agrees with this opinion, he believes that it is better for investors to invest in cheap and quickly payback small stations...