Mirny: A Giant Onshore Wind Project in Kazakhstan

In 2023, TotalEnergies signed an investment agreement with the Government of Kazakhstan for the giant Mirny onshore wind project in response to the dual challenge of reducing carbon emissions and electrifying isolated rural areas. Developed in partnership with the National Wealth Fund Samruk-Kazyna and the National Company KazMunayGas, the wind farm will be capable of supplying one million people with electricity from renewable sources, thereby helping decarbonize the country’s energy mix.

In the Zhambyl region in southeast Kazakhstan, we are developing the Mirny onshore wind project with our partners. It will harness the winds that sweep across the region’s semi-arid expanses (averaging 8.9 meters per second per year) and transform them into low-carbon electricity. Featuring a total capacity of one gigawatt (GW), this onshore wind farm’s 140 wind turbines will be combined with a 600 megawatt-hours (MWh) battery-based ESS for a reliable and sustainable power supply.

Contributing to Kazakhstan’s energy transition

In a country where our Company has been active since 1992, especially through our hydrocarbon production activities, the Mirny project perfectly illustrates the multi-energy strategy that we are implementing in oil and gas countries. Historically focused on oil and gas, and experiencing sustained growth in its energy demand, Kazakhstan has set itself the target of increasing the proportion of renewable energies in its electricity production to 15% by 2030⁽¹⁾.

According to a 25-year power purchase agreement (PPA) signed in June 2023, all the electricity produced by the Mirny project will be sold to the Financial Settlement Center of Renewable Energy, a public entity owned by the Government of Kazakhstan, for the supply of the national grid. The Mirny facilities will deliver 4 TWh a year of renewable electricity, covering the needs of one million inhabitants, i.e. 4% of the country’s production. Mirny will reinforce the solar power plants that we already operate in the country and will help avoid 3.5 million tons of CO₂ emissions per year.

Meeting the technical challenges of a wind farm in the heart of Kazakhstan

The Mirny wind farm is currently the largest wind farm project ever undertaken in Kazakhstan. It represents a real technical challenge, not least because of its sheer size (it is almost 10 times bigger than the country’s largest solar power plant), the region’s extreme weather conditions (a summer-winter temperature difference of 70°C), and its distance from the electricity grid, requiring the construction of more than 200 km of power lines. Construction is due to start in the fall of 2025, with the first electricity injected into the grid in 2028.

⁽¹⁾ https://www.iea.org/countries/kazakhstan