Before last year, energy was one of the bright spots in Nagorno-Karabakh’s economy. The de facto authorities had built a network of small hydropower plants to supplement a larger, Soviet-era dam. As a result, the territory produced all its own electricity – the majority of which was from hydropower – and by 2018 was even exporting some to Armenia. It was one of the few spheres in which Nagorno-Karabakh was not dependent on its patron state. Following last year’s war, however, Azerbaijan retook much of the territory that it had lost in the first war between the two sides in the 1990s. And that land included most of those hydropower plants. Of the 36 plants that operated in Armenian-controlled territory before the war, only six remain under Armenian control. The hydropower production capacity in the territory decreased from 191 megawatts before the war to 79 megawatts now. “Indeed, they […]