Uzbekistan ran on Soviet-era gas, heavy industry and cotton. This Financial Times film follows its attempt to reinvent that economy around renewable energy, both to keep the lights on and to rebrand the country as open for business. The pressure is real. The film reports the population has nearly doubled since the Soviet collapse in 1991, growth is running at 6 to 7 percent, and the energy minister says the country has gone from a net exporter of natural gas to a net importer. With most of its oil fields described as depleted and gas supplies projected to last only about 20 more years, the question the film poses is blunt: how do you build a clean energy system more or less from scratch?
The answer on screen is a mix of market reform and foreign capital, mostly from the Gulf. The film says Uzbekistan broke up its old Soviet-style energy monopoly starting in 2018, splitting generation, transmission and distribution, and reformed tariffs to make the sector investable. Gulf-based developers arrived first, and the film cites large committed pipelines from them, including one developer's figure of roughly 11,400 megawatts and a multi-billion-dollar commitment from an Emirati renewables firm. Western investors, by the film's account, have stayed cautious. That pattern fits a wider trend across Central Asia, where state-backed Gulf funds have been willing to commit early to frontier markets that Western firms still treat as risky. The wrinkle worth watching is whether the cheap money keeps flowing on the same terms, and whether a country reforming this fast can actually absorb the projects it has signed. Several voices in the film raise exactly that concern. On the ground, the film shows the shift already visible in the capital, Tashkent: electric cars built locally by BYD, a growing fleet of electric buses, and ordinary households fitting cheap imported solar panels to their rooftops.
The film lays out targets that keep climbing. An initial goal of 25 percent of electricity from renewables by 2030 has, by the film's account, been revised up to 54 percent, alongside a first nuclear plant by 2035 and a net zero pledge by 2050. Generating the power is only half the job. The film stresses the grid: it reports more than 60 percent of the network is over 30 years old, and that storage, both batteries and pumped hydro, has emerged as the main tool for balancing supply, since the country's water is too scarce to lean on hydropower. Officials describe building more than 5,000 km of high-voltage lines and new substations, with developers now helping fund transmission. The longer-term ambition in the film reaches beyond the border: a green corridor that would send renewable power from Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan toward Europe through a subsea cable by 2030. The film also shows businesses making the switch, including a garment maker that says solar covers about 80 percent of its office needs and an agricultural firm running almost entirely on solar, often to meet the sustainability rules of the global brands they supply. Not everyone is convinced, and one observer in the film cautions that the targets deserve a pinch of salt.
Bottom line: Uzbekistan's plan is genuinely ambitious, and the early Gulf investment is real money rather than a press release. But ambition is the easy part. The harder test, as the film's skeptics point out, is institutional: the bureaucracy, the aging grid and the capacity to deliver dozens of projects at once. If the country clears that bar, it ends up well ahead of neighbors still tied to fossil fuels. If it does not, the targets become the kind of headline number that slips quietly year after year. The grid build-out, not the solar farms, is the thing to watch.
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