Problems of development of renewable energy facilities in rural regions on example of Kazakhstan

This manuscript presents an overview of the difficulties and problems with the development of the renewable energy sources in the rural regions of Kazakhstan. At the beginning a brief overview of the available renewables and their potential evaluation based on the publicly available tools in the rural regions of Kazakhstan is presented. Problems of the development of the renewable energy facilities in the rural regions can be divided into two groups: organizational and technical. The first group is more connected with renewable energy (RES) development programs and strategies. Kazakhstan's programs and strategies for the renewables development, their benefits and lacks are analyzed in the paper as well. One of the most important technical issues with the renewable energy development and wide application in rural regions can be identified as a grid connection barrier and unit commitment problem. The origin of this problem is based on the nature of the renewable energy facilities - variable generation. The technical solutions of the problem are analyzed in the article and can be classified into three groups: precise choosing of the type of the renewable energy facility; using electrical energy storage systems; solving the unit commitment problem and overcome grid connection barriers. We showed that there is a possibly of a significant growth of the renewable energy development and production in the rural area of Kazakhstan and there are several ways of breaking the “wall” of technical issues.