AKSA Takes Samarkand's Wires for $357 Million — Uzbekistan Rents Out Another Grid

The number to hold in mind is $357 million. That is the capital Turkey's AKSA Elektrik has committed under a public-private partnership signed off by President Shavkat Mirziyoyev to modernise and operate the electricity distribution network in Samarkand region. The document was approved this week. It is a distribution concession, not a generation build — and that distinction is where the story lives.

The political read is straightforward: Tashkent continues to sell operating rights over strategic infrastructure to foreign operators because the state utility cannot fund the capex and cannot price electricity at cost recovery without provoking social friction. Samarkand is now the latest oblast to be handed to an outside concessionaire. The physical read is more interesting.

Uzbekistan's grid loses power at every stage between generator and meter. Public disclosures over the last two years put technical and commercial losses on the low-voltage network in the mid-teens percent range across several oblasts — the figure is not uniformly reported and the ministry has been careful with it. A distribution concession is, in effect, a bet by AKSA that it can drive that loss number down by rebuilding transformer stations, replacing conductor, and installing metering that actually bills what it measures. Every percentage point of loss recovered on a regional grid of Samarkand's scale is measured in hundreds of gigawatt-hours a year — power that does not have to be generated at Talimarjon or imported from Turkmenistan in the winter shoulder.

That is the supply side of the ledger. On the demand side, Samarkand region has been running structural shortfalls in winter peak — households on rotational cuts, industrial users on interruptible contracts they did not sign up for. Modernised distribution does not create electrons, but it changes how many of the electrons already leaving the busbar arrive at the meter. For a system whose generation stack is gas-heavy and gas-short — Uzbekistan has been a net gas importer since 2023 — every recovered kilowatt-hour on the wires is a cubic metre of gas the country does not have to buy from Gazprom under the swap arrangement signed in 2023.

The inventory dimension here is gas storage, not electricity. Uzbekistan enters each winter with underground gas stocks that industry filings describe as tight relative to peak withdrawal need. A distribution concession that reduces electrical losses in Samarkand reduces the marginal call on gas-fired generation in January and February. That is the operational implication AKSA is being paid to deliver.

The financial move is separate from the physical move. The $357 million is capex; the return comes from a tariff structure Tashkent has not fully disclosed. Prior Uzbek PPPs in generation — the Turkish and Emirati solar and gas builds of 2020-2024 — were structured around dollar-denominated take-or-pay offtake agreements with sovereign guarantees. A distribution concession is harder to structure that way, because the counterparty risk is the retail customer, not the grid operator. Whatever AKSA has agreed, it has agreed to collect from Samarkand households and enterprises, in soum, at a tariff the regulator sets. That is a different risk profile from anything previously signed in the sector.