Kazakhstan keeps wasting energy and water

Vice-PM Kairat Kelimbetov talked about the objectives of Kazakhstan Agency for Natural Monopolies Regulation at the Agency’s extended meeting on February 1, Tengrinews.kz reports. In particular, the Agency has to tackle over-normlosses of energy and water. “President and Prime-Minister has set new objectives to the Agency. The Agency was criticized at the extended government meeting with the President’s participation for failing to reduce normative and excess losses of energy and water. Reduction of losses in our power networks has not even come close to the European level. In this relation the government instructed the Agency to ensure elimination of over-norm losses and decrease of normative losses of energy and water,” Kelimbetov said. “Please report on the implemented measures and the Agency’s actions by the end of H1,” Vice-PM instructed. Kelimbetov reminded that Prime-Minister Karim Massimov instructed to ensure sustainability of the rates of monopolists at the last board meeting. “51 companies are already working in the mode of investment rates. First of all we need to make sure that the investors fulfill the obligations that they have undertaken. The agency has to analyze the investors’ work and present the initial analysis by the end of March. It will be interesting to see and discuss the measures suggested by associations and investors. There should always be an equal and mutually beneficial dialog between all the parties,” he noted. Earlier the President transferred the functions on development of policies to retain rates and inflation corridor to the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade. “In this relation I request Economy Ministry and the Agency to calculate the allowable influence on the inflation by the change of rates for the regulated services,” Kairat Kelimbetov said. “I understand that the Agency’s task is very complicated. On the one side there are consumers and inflation. On the other side there are the monopolies. But I think that this is what the Agency does: it should find an optimal balance of interests and needs. The Agency also needs to find methods that would motivate natural monopolies to make qualitative transformations of their activities. The works has already started and I think that we need to make transformations in our general activities, that’s why I suggest to analyze the bottlenecks of the Agency’s activities by July 1 with involvement of international consultants, e.g. European Bank for Reconstruction and Development,” Kairat Kelimbetov stated.