Energy

Mongolia has a huge potential to export renewable electricity across Northern Asia. According to the ‘Renewables Readiness Assessment: Mongolia’ from the International Renewable Energy Agency (“IRENA”), Mongolia’s mostly untapped renewable resources could be used to kick-start a major cross border power corridor between Russia, Mongolia, China, South Korea and Japan. Mongolia’s Gobi Desert has a vast renewable energy potential of 2.6TW.

Mongolia’s current power generation capacity is currently made up of just 7% from renewables and the government set a target of 20% renewables by 2023 and 30% by 2030. Mongolia’s parliament recently adopted broad measures aimed at future sustainability including the Green Development Policy and the Law on Energy Conservation and Efficiency. The new law enables Mongolia to provide energy security and reliability.

Wind Power

• Mongolia has potential to become one of the major wind power producers.
• 10% of the total land area can be classified as excellent for utility scale applications, Power density 40—600W/m2, the resource could potentially supply over 1100 GW of installed capacity. Wind power classification of Good-to-Excellent wind power resources are equivalent to 1,113,300 MW of wind electric

Solar Energy

• About 270-300 sunny days per year with an average sunlight duration of 2,250-3,300 hours are available in most regions of Mongolia. Annual average amount of solar energy is 1,400 kWh/ m2 with solar intensity of 4.3-4.7 kWh/m2 per day.

Hydro Power

• There are 3800 small and big streams and rivers in our country, which could support up to 6417.7 MW of power and deliver 56.2 billion kWh of electric energy annually. • Theoretical potential 6.2GW, more than 1 GW of these has been identified.

Geography and climate

Bordered on the north by Russia and on the east, south and west by China, Mongolia has a total area of one point five million square kilometers, making it the nineteenth largest country in the world and the second largest landlocked country. For administrative purposes, the territory is divided into three cities and twenty-one provinces (aimags). The most significant population center is the capital Ulaanbaatar, home to approximately 1.3 million people.

Mongolia is situated on a plateau far from any oceans, with average elevation of one and a half kilometers. 5 This gives it an extreme continental climate which varies considerably across the country and between the seasons. Broadly speaking, elevation is lowest in the east of the country, rising to the Altai mountain range in the west. Mongolia’s highest point is a mountain peak marking the western border between Mongolia, Russia and China. Travelling from north to south, one would go from Siberian forests and lakes, pass through open steppe grassland and mountains, and ultimately reach the Gobi desert.

The country has long cold winters and short warm summers. Winters are dry and summer rainfall rarely exceeds three hundred and eighty millimeters in the mountains and is less than fifty millimeters in the desert areas. 6 Temperatures in Ulaanbaatar can regularly exceed thirty degrees Celsius from mid-June to mid-August, but are also often below minus thirty degrees Celsius in winter. Spring and autumn are unpredictable and snow can be seen in early June or late August. However, spells of warm weather also occur at early as April and as late as October.