THE FUTURE OF ALTERNATIVE ENERGY IN ARMENIA
By Robert Kurkjian and Matthew Karanian

British Airways Impressions Magazine September-November 2004

With its Soviet-built nuclear power plant nearing the end of its life and international pressure to “go green”, Armenia has the opportunity to position itself at the forefront of nvironmentally friendly energy production. Matthew Karanian and Robert Kurkjian explore the wind, water and solar options available and assess their viability.

During the 1990s, Armenia grappled with how to resolve its energy shortages. Since then, its nuclear power plant has been restarted, financial and technical assistance has come from the international community, natural gas imports have increased and the energy crisis has been mitigated.

The country now relies upon a variety of sources, with nuclear energy accounting for about 35% of its energy needs, but over the past few years there has been increased pressure from the European Community to shut the nuclear plant down.

The Metsamor Nuclear Power Plant is operated by a Russian company and has two reactors with projected useful lives that will expire in a decade. Only one of the reactors is operating, and there are many reasons for shutting it down and keeping the other closed.

The most persuasive of these arguments is that the reactors sit in a seismically active zone near a densely populated area, and they don’t have a containment dome that would prevent the release of radiation during an uncontrolled event.

The government has been studying energy issues since Armenia’s independence. Back in 1996, it projected that alternative sources of energy might be developed within the next six to eight years.

At that time it was thought that those alternative sources might be enough to make it possible to shut down the nuclear power plant as early as 2004. Those alternative sources have not been developed – at least not to the extent necessary for them to be considered a genuine alternative to nuclear power.

Thermal power plants in Armenia, using a combination of oil and natural gas, fuel approximately 45% of the country’s needs and hydropower provides the balance. Strictly speaking, these are alternatives to nuclear power, but the cleanest, most cutting edge alternative energy sources available today are solar and wind.

These sources, also referred to as “renewable energy”, are cleaner than traditional sources, such as coal or oil combustion. Solar and wind power do have an impact upon our environment, but they don’t pollute the atmosphere during operation. Instead, the nvironmental impact is from the perceived blight upon the landscape created by a field of wind turbines or solar panels. Wind turbines have also been known to be harmful to birds and can be noisy, but such environmental problems are relatively insignificant compared to the problems that are created by nuclear and thermal energy generation.

WIND ENERGY

Armenia doesn’t have a wind stream that is comparable to the Gulf Stream that exists in the US, but there is nevertheless some wind potential. Armenia is a mountainous country and strong winds frequently develop on mountain ridges or in the saddles of mountain passes. Indeed, some of these local wind currents are legendary.

According to fable, the stones of Armenia’s hot Ararat Plain were cooled by a unique airflow pattern. 1700 years ago, that swept down from the northern mountains and from the Lake Sevan region. The wind supposedly made life a bit more comfortable for an embattled man named Gregory, who was confined to a prison there. This man would later become a Saint, and the wind pattern has since been known as the Saint Gregory Wind.

At present, it is estimated that the economically viable capacity for wind energy is approximately equal to that of nuclear, about 500 MW, but wind energy development in Armenia is in its infancy.

As part of a project funded by Gerard Cafesjian, an Armenian- American philanthropist, engineers are studying the economic viability of wind-generated electricity in Armenia. Testing is ongoing, but if wind power proves to be feasible, then Armenia could add wind-generated electricity to its portfolio of energy sources.

Windmills – actually large wind turbines – are sleek and aerodynamic. They are made of aluminum, steel or plastic and often operate in large fields. A wind-generated electricity project in Palm Springs, California, for example, uses a field of 7,500 windmills. It’s too costly to use one windmill to generate electricity for commercial purposes, but a single windmill can power a mechanical pump, which is how they are sometimes used in the US and places with extensive rural areas – Argentina, for example, has an estimated 320,000 solo windmills in operation.

Armenia has large tracts of rural areas, but one of the legacies of Soviet industrialisation is that nearly every place in Armenia has access to the electricity grid, so a remote location that might otherwise need to generate its own energy simply doesn’t need to. The future for wind power in Armenia, therefore, is in large wind farms that generate electricity that is then added to the grid. The Armenian government hopes one day to be able to generate as much as 10% of its electricity in this way. Continued......

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