Azernews.Az

Energy efficiency should become the main trend of Kazakhstan's Energy Strategy being developed by the KAZENERGY association, the chairman of the association, Timur Kulibayev, said at a meeting with representatives of national companies, ministries and foreign experts.

"Energy efficiency is the main and primary trend in the development of the national energy strategy. The goals for 2020 should be defined clearly: Achievement of a 30 per cent reduction of energy consumption in the country by increasing energy efficiency, which is an achievable figure," Kulibayev said.

He reminded that 80 per cent of electricity is generated from coal in Kazakhstan.

"First of all we need to focus on the development of energy efficiency at coal power plants. And only after upgrading the existing facilities based on coal, we can switch to the modernisation of gas generation. After all these prerequisites, we can begin to switch to the development of renewable energy sources," he said.

According to the Minister of Environmental Protection, Nurlan Kapparov, who was at the meeting, introducing energy efficiency needs "more aggressive steps."

"Energy efficiency is something laying on the surface in a literal sense. 30 per cent is quite acceptable and real potential for reducing electric power consumption in the country," Kapparov said.

This means that according to his calculations, with the current volume of economy, the country could consume 70 billion kWh of electric power instead of 100 billion per year.

"That is, in other words, before building new power plants, we must use the full potential of existing ones using energy efficiency," he added.

According to Kulibayev, the second important step is ensuring energy efficiency be the result of modernisation of all baseline networks in the country which must also link the power generating centre of the country with the energy deficient western region.

"Then we will have a full domestic supply," the head of KAZENERGY said.

He also said that the third main direction of the document will be the development of renewable energy sources (RES).

"All the planned projects on renewable energy will be implemented, but now we need to gain experience. When the cost of electricity from renewable energy sources is comparable to the cost of conventional energy sources, then we will broadly develop RES. And we have set an ambitious goal to bring their share up to 10 per cent in 2030, "Kulibayev said.