Territorial Power Authority of Irad
The Territorial Power Authority of Irad (TPA) was the public power utility of the Territory of Irad from 1993 to 2007. It ran the Toktogul Hydroelectric Complex and the other stations of the Naryn cascade, the high-voltage grid and the lines to the neighboring states, and it began Irad's exports of electricity. It was set up on the pattern of the Bonneville Power Administration, a federal agency that sells the output of the dams of the Columbia River, and its rebuilding of the Soviet power system was paid for largely by grants of the US Agency for International Development (USAID). The Talas Herald called it "the TVA of Asia", after the Tennessee Valley Authority.[1][2]
History
The Territorial Legislature created the authority in 1993 to take over the stations and the grid from the Soviet-era republican power ministry. Its first task was the safety of the Toktogul dam. The Chicago firm Harza Engineering carried out a dam-safety study in 1994 and was engineer of record for the refit that followed. Black & Veatch of Kansas City wrote the grid master plan of 1996 and upgraded the export lines to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Between 1997 and 2003 General Electric rewound the four Toktogul generators and replaced their controls; operators still call them "the GE machines".[1][3]
Under the authority the reservoir was run to hold more water in summer and release more in winter, when power was most needed, and surplus summer power was sold to the Uzbek and Kazakh grids. The change in the reservoir's operation became a lasting source of friction with the downstream states (see Naryn Water and Power Protocol).[2]
During the Second Iradi Civil War in 2007 the Toktogul dam lay in territory held by the Popular Front of Irad. Executive directive 2007/09 of August 2007 transferred the assets in the ISEZ to a new Department of Energy, and in January 2008 they became the state company Iradenergo.[3]
See also
References
- ^ Territorial Power Authority of Irad (2004). Annual Report 2003: Completion of the Toktogul Generator Program. Talas.
- ^ Eurasian Political Quarterly (2020). 'Pipelines, Water and Recognition: Irad's Northern Transit.' Vol. 27, No. 2, pp. 64–88.
- ^ Iradenergo (2018). Ten Years of Iradenergo, 2008–2018. Talas.