Uzbekistan is transitioning to renewable energy faster than almost any other country in Central Asia — and the world is starting to pay attention. Once almost entirely dependent on Soviet-era gas infrastructure, this landlocked nation of 36 million people has launched one of the most ambitious clean energy transformations in the emerging world. With gas reserves projected to run out in just 20 years, rising temperatures, and a population that has nearly doubled since 1991, Uzbekistan isn't treating green energy as an option — it's treating it as a survival strategy.
So how exactly is this transformation happening, who is funding it, and can Uzbekistan actually pull it off? We went to Tashkent to find out.
How Is Uzbekistan Transitioning to Renewable Energy?
The short answer: by doing something rare for a post-Soviet state — breaking up a government monopoly and inviting the private sector in. Reform began in 2018, when Uzbekistan dismantled its old Soviet-style energy monopoly, splitting generation, transmission, and distribution into separate businesses. Generation was opened up first, creating the conditions that investors had been waiting for.
The government set three core conditions that any serious energy market needs: a competitive mechanism to set prices, a power purchase agreement to guarantee a place to sell electricity, and a creditworthy buyer on the other end of the contract. Uzbekistan put all three in place — and then told the world it was open for business.
The results have been striking. Electric vehicles are now a common sight on Tashkent's streets. BYD manufactures cars locally. Electric buses are rolling out across major cities. And ordinary citizens are installing cheap Chinese solar panels on their rooftops, generating their own power and drawing down on subsidised bank loans to do it. One installer we spoke to said his system covers his household needs for up to nine hours a day and will pay itself back within seven to eight years.
What Is Uzbekistan's Green Energy Plan and Timeline?
The targets are bold. Initially, Uzbekistan set a goal of 25% of electricity from renewables by 2030, with a 20% improvement in energy efficiency. But encouraged by early progress, the government has already revised those targets upward — significantly.
- 54% of power from renewables by 2030
- First nuclear power station operational by 2035
- Net zero carbon emissions by 2050
The Ministry of Energy acknowledges the scale of the challenge directly. With almost 85% of oil fields depleted and gas supplies under serious pressure, Uzbekistan's Energy Minister has been candid: the country has become a net importer of natural gas. A growing middle class, expanding industry, and rising living standards are all driving energy demand upward. The old infrastructure simply cannot keep pace.
Businesses are already responding. Samarkand Apparel, a garment manufacturer supplying global fashion brands, has installed solar panels across its employee car park, generating enough electricity to cover around 80% of its office energy needs. Agricultural conglomerate BNB Holdings has gone almost entirely solar — not just out of environmental conviction, but because major international buyers now require suppliers to meet green economy standards before they'll place an order.
Who Is Investing Billions in Uzbekistan's Clean Energy?
The first major international investors to arrive came from the Gulf — and they came with serious capital. ACWA Power, the Saudi Arabian energy developer, signed its first project in Uzbekistan in 2020. Today, the company has a committed project pipeline of $15 billion, representing around 11,400 megawatts of power — a mix of projects that are already operational, under construction, or in advanced development.
Masdar, the UAE-based renewables giant, was actually the first company to sign a long-term power purchase agreement with Uzbekistan. Starting with a 100 MW solar project in the Navoi region, Masdar has now committed over $2 billion to the country across solar, wind, and battery storage projects totalling around 2 gigawatts.
What's notable about both companies is their willingness to go beyond simply building power plants. Both ACWA and Masdar have taken on responsibility for constructing overhead transmission lines and grid infrastructure — helping solve one of the country's most pressing bottlenecks.
Western investors, however, have been more cautious. State-backed Gulf funds can afford to commit capital now and wait decades for returns, absorbing political risk that Western institutional investors are not structured to tolerate. Until a major Western firm takes that first step into Uzbekistan, analysts say, broader Western investment is likely to remain limited.
What Challenges Does Central Asia Face With Renewables?
Building solar and wind capacity is one thing. Getting that power to the people who need it is another — and this is where Uzbekistan faces its most serious structural challenge.
More than 60% of the country's electricity grid is over 30 years old. The Soviet-era gas plants that traditionally balanced the system are aging and increasingly inflexible. Hydropower — the usual backup for intermittent renewables — is not a reliable option for Uzbekistan, which faces genuine water scarcity. And battery storage, while growing, is nowhere near the scale required to manage a grid that is rapidly adding variable renewable capacity.
The government's response is a massive grid modernisation programme: over 5,000 kilometres of new high-voltage transmission lines at 220kV and 500kV, along with new substations across the country. But experts warn that institutional capacity may be the real limiting factor. Uzbekistan's bureaucracy, while reforming, still moves slowly. The pipeline of incoming projects is growing faster than the government's ability to process and support them — a tension that several investors described frankly in our conversations.
As one analyst put it: "Sometimes you have to take these targets with a pinch of salt. The appetite is larger than what the system can actually cope with at the moment."
How Did Uzbekistan Break Up Its Soviet Energy Monopoly?
The structural reforms that made all of this possible are easy to underestimate. Before 2018, Uzbekistan's energy sector was a single vertically integrated state monopoly — a relic of Soviet central planning. Unbundling it into separate generation, transmission, and distribution businesses was a significant institutional and political achievement.
Critically, the government also reformed consumer tariffs — the prices that households and businesses pay for electricity. Without those tariff reforms, as one investor noted bluntly, nothing in the sector would have been investable. Generation projects need a functioning market on the demand side, not just on the supply side. Getting both right at the same time is something many developing economies struggle to do. Uzbekistan did it quickly enough to attract major capital within just a few years of beginning the process.
Could Uzbekistan Become a Net Energy Exporter?
Once Uzbekistan meets its own energy needs, the government's longer-term ambition is to export clean electricity — particularly to Pakistan and Afghanistan in the south. The country already participates in regional power-sharing arrangements with its Central Asian neighbours, and officials speak openly about deepening those connections.
But the most striking vision goes much further. By 2030, Uzbekistan wants to connect its grid to Europe through a proposed Green Corridor — a route that would carry renewable electricity from Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Azerbaijan via a subsea cable through the Black Sea. If realised, it would make Uzbekistan not just an energy success story within Central Asia, but a meaningful supplier to the European market.
What Is the Green Corridor Linking Central Asia to Europe?
The Green Corridor concept represents the outer edge of Uzbekistan's energy ambitions. The idea is to create a transmission pathway that connects the solar and wind resources of Central Asia — some of the most abundant in the world — with European electricity markets that are hungry for clean imports following the disruption of Russian gas supplies.
The corridor would run through Azerbaijan, cross the Caspian region, and reach Europe via the Black Sea. Uzbekistan is positioning itself not just as a participant in this corridor, but as an originating source of the renewable energy it would carry.
Whether the timeline is realistic is genuinely debated. But the strategic logic is sound, and the geopolitical moment — with Europe actively diversifying its energy supply chains — gives the project a tailwind that would have seemed unlikely just five years ago.
The Verdict: Is Uzbekistan's Green Energy Bet Working?
The evidence so far is more promising than most sceptics expected. Billions of dollars in investment have been committed. Projects are operational. Reforms that analysts once described as necessary but unlikely have actually happened. The country's ambition has already moved markets.
The risks are real: institutional bottlenecks, grid infrastructure gaps, an over-stretched bureaucracy, and the ever-present challenge of sustaining reform momentum in a country with a complex political history. But Uzbekistan has always been a crossroads — a place where civilisations met, traded, and adapted. Today, it's making a deliberate choice to stand at the crossroads of the fossil fuel past and the renewable energy future. Whatever happens next, the rest of the world has good reason to watch.
