With a cold, dark winter inching closer each day in Kyrgyzstan, the government is desperately trying to strike bilateral energy-import agreements with anyone and everyone. But as policymakers go hunting around Central Asia to plug an estimated deficit of over 2 billion kilowatt-hours, prices and political differences are potent sticking points.

Any bilateral deal would require the differential in electricity costs be borne either by the insolvent government, or by ordinary Kyrgyzstanis, who are accustomed to paying $0.015 per kilowatt-hour. That’s far below the cost of production and substantially less than citizens pay in any other Central Asian country.

So Kazakh electricity, which costs around four times as much for Kazakhs, is expensive to most Kyrgyz, although that didn’t stop Astana and Bishkek agreeing to an import deal in principle last week. Tajik electricity is over one-and-a-half times as expensive as the Kyrgyz version and it is doubtful whether a country whose own rural residents spend a lot of time in the dark has any power to spare.

The perfect cure to a Kyrgyz winter of misery, then, could come from gas-rich Turkmenistan. 

Turkmenistan has supplied both Tajikistan and another poor, energy-deficient country, Afghanistan, in the past, and tends to sell at rates more affordable than either Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan. Kyrgyzstan’s acting energy minister, Kubanychbek Turdubaev, spoke of his enthusiasm for reaching an arrangement with the isolated country October 16; a Kyrgyz delegation should arrive in the Turkmen capital November 1. 

The hitch is that electricity from Turkmenistan must transit Uzbekistan, a country that often seems to wish Kyrgyzstan would crash and burn. It is Tashkent’s obstinacy, after all, that has left Kyrgyzstan’s southern city of Osh without gas this winter, driving up electricity consumption. Kyrgyz President Almazbek Atambayev also complained earlier this summer that Tashkent was attempting to stop his country from hosting a stretch of the newest Turkmenistan-to-China gas pipeline (known as Line D) that, on paper, transits Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. 

To get electricity from Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan would have to pay Uzbekistan a transit fee. Even then, Uzbekistan could cut supplies at any moment. Kazakh electricity, while not the cheapest option, seems by far the safest.