Kyrgyzstan to Extend School Winter Holidays to Spring 2009 Due to Power Crisis

Excerpt from report by Russian state news agency ITAR-TASS

Bishkek, 26 September: Due to a power crisis, winter holidays will be extended for several schools in Kyrgyzstan from 25 December to 1 March [2009], the Kyrgyz minister of industry, energy and fuel resources, Saparbek Balkibekov, said in parliament today.

He said that nearly two-month-long holidays would have to be introduced in only secondary schools that had failed to switch from electrical heating to other types of fuel on time.

The minister did not specify the number of secondary schools in Kyrgyzstan where winter holidays will be extended. He, however, said that “teaching schedules, different from the generally accepted ones, have been envisaged for schoolchildren” at educational institutions which had failed to switch their heating systems to solid fuel on time.

The shortage of water is said to be the official cause of the power crisis in Kyrgyzstan. As a result of this, power stations failed to collect the sufficient amount of water in the Toktogul reservoir – the major reservoir in Central Asia – which is necessary to generate electricity in usual volumes.

There is a considerable shortage of electricity in Kyrgyzstan, Prime Minister Igor Chudinov said in parliament today. He said that the shortage of electricity was about 2.6bn kWh at present.

The Kyrgyz prime minister said that there was currently 9.62bn cubic metres of water in the Toktogul reservoir, which generates as much as 50 per cent of the overall electricity in the country. He said that this was “by 4.1 per cent lower than in the similar period of last year”.

According to experts, the Toktogul reservoir may be replenished with another 2.5bn cubic metres of water in the next few months. However, this may prove to be insufficient to generate the necessary amount of electricity in the coming winter.

[Passage omitted: Kyrgyzstan reached an agreement with Kazakhstan to import 250m kWh of electricity]

Originally published by ITAR-TASS news agency, Moscow, in Russian 0845 26 Sep 08.

(c) 2008 BBC Monitoring Central Asia. Provided by ProQuest LLC. All rights Reserved.