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Uzbekistan’s Ministry of Energy and its National Statistics Committee have published conflicting figures for electricity generation in the first nine months of 2026, with a gap of roughly 2.44 billion kilowatt-hours between the two official tallies — a discrepancy that has drawn public criticism from an economist and prompted the ministry to offer a partial explanation.
The Statistics Committee recorded national electricity output at 67.16 billion kilowatt-hours for January through September. The Ministry of Energy, covering the same period, reported 69.6 billion kilowatt-hours. Economist Otabek Bakirov flagged the divergence and called on both agencies to account for it publicly.
Rooftop Solar as the Missing Variable
When the news outlet Podrobno.uz put the question to the Ministry of Energy, its press service suggested the Statistics Committee may have omitted electricity generated by small rooftop solar installations — known as Rooftop stations — mounted on residential and commercial buildings. According to the ministry, those installations produced 2.5 billion kilowatt-hours between January and September, a figure that closely matches the 2.44 billion kilowatt-hour gap between the two agencies.
The ministry had already cited the 2.5 billion kilowatt-hour figure at a briefing on 20 October devoted to nine-month generation and supply results. At that event it noted that small-capacity solar panels had surpassed their entire 2025 output of two billion kilowatt-hours in just nine months — a sign of rapid expansion in distributed generation.
An Explanation, Not a Confirmation
The ministry was careful to present rooftop solar as a possible explanation rather than a definitive one, leaving open the question of whether other categories of small producers — such as block stations — might also account for part of the difference. The Statistics Committee has not publicly responded to the discrepancy.
The episode points to a broader methodological challenge: as distributed and small-scale renewable generation grows quickly, the boundaries of what each agency counts in its headline figures may diverge in ways that are not immediately transparent to policymakers, investors or the public. Until both bodies align their definitions and reporting perimeters, official electricity statistics will carry an unresolved margin of uncertainty of at least this magnitude.