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The city with the area of four thousand hectares will be designed for 500 thousand residents. It will be powered mainly by renewable energy sources (RES). The key mode of transport will be electric vehicles, which are supposed to interconnect the city’s infrastructure, including its hotels, shopping malls and business centres. The project will not only ‘unload’ Bishkek (the capital located within five hours drive from Issyk-Kul), but also partially solve the problem of labour migration through the domestic market growth. According to the World Bank, the volume of migrant remittances as a share of Kyrgyzstan’s GDP exceeds 30 percent.
Hydropower plants (HPPs) are the key energy sources in Kyrgyzstan, accounting for 85 percent of generation in 2021, according to the data of International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA). The country has 16 HPPs with the total capacity of 3,684 MW.
It is possible to meet the domestic demand by building new power units (putting in operation the new HPPs and NPPs is under discussion between Kyrgyzstan and Rosatom and RusHydro) or restoring the unified water and energy system of Central Asia: in this case, being rich in hydro resources, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, would supply water to Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan from the reservoirs of their own HPPs and receive electricity in return.