President of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev demanded to speed up work on the construction of the Balkhash Thermal Power Plant
8 October 2013
The commissioning of the Balkhash Thermal Power Plant will reduce the energy shortage in the south of the country. The agreement on construction was reached in 2010 during negotiations between the presidents of the Republic of Kazakhstan and South Korea. In 2011 An intergovernmental agreement between the two states was signed on the division of responsibilities in the field of development, financing, design, construction, operation and maintenance of the Balkhash Thermal Power Plant. In turn, Chairman of the Board of the Samruk-Kazyna Fund Umirzak Shukeyev recalled that an authorized capital of $120 million has been created for these purposes. “With this money, design and estimate documentation is now being developed and infrastructure is being built. But a lot of money, 2 billion, will be available to us after we approve the tariff, we got involved in a discussion about the choice of fuel, lost time, they promise to resolve these issues before November,” Shukeyev said.
The construction completion date is 2018, after which the thermal power plant should reach its design capacity of 1320 MW and produce 9.209 billion kWh of electricity per year. “This large facility must be under the control of the government,” said the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev.
