Mongolian energy,
explained.
One country, one grid, one winter that decides everything. These answers cover how Mongolian electricity and heat actually work: who runs the system, what your tariff pays for, why the country imports power, where the winter smoke comes from, and what is being built next. No background needed. Read from the top and you will know the basics.
Every answer states the year it describes. The national figures come from the 2025 Energy Regulatory Commission statistics, the same source as the atlas.
Start with the basics
Six words explain most energy news. Learn them here and the rest of the page reads easily.
What is the difference between a kilowatt and a kilowatt-hour?
A kilowatt (kW) is a speed. A kilowatt-hour (kWh) is an amount. Your kettle draws about 2 kW while it boils. Leave it running for half an hour and it has used 1 kWh.
Your electricity bill counts kilowatt-hours, because you pay for the amount you used, not for how fast you used it.
A plant is "300 MW". Does that mean it produces 300 MW?
No. 300 MW is the most the plant can produce at one moment, on a good day, with everything running. It is a ceiling, not an output.
What it actually produced over a year is measured in gigawatt-hours (GWh). A coal plant may run near its ceiling most of the year. A solar farm cannot: it stops every night.
This is the single most common confusion in energy news. Capacity is a promise. Generation is the result.
How big is a gigawatt-hour?
One gigawatt-hour is one million kilowatt-hours. Mongolia generated 9,911.9 GWh at home in 2025 and imported 2,700.5 GWh more.
A typical apartment household uses a few hundred kilowatt-hours a month, so one gigawatt-hour covers a few thousand households for a month. The country runs on roughly 12,612.5 GWh a year.
What is "the grid", and why does it matter that supply matches demand?
The grid is the wires that connect every power station to every socket. Electricity is not stored inside it. What the country uses at 19:00 must be generated at 19:00.
A dispatch centre balances the two every second. If a big unit trips and nothing replaces it fast enough, the system protects itself by cutting supply to part of the network. That is what a load-shedding blackout is.
What is a CHP plant, and why does Mongolia rely on them?
A combined heat and power plant burns coal to make electricity and sells the leftover heat as hot water for district heating. One plant, two products.
That is efficient in a cold country, but it ties the two together. In winter the plants must run to keep the city warm, whether or not their electricity is the cheapest available at that hour.
Heat is measured in Gcal. What is that?
A gigacalorie (Gcal) is the standard unit for heat sold through pipes, the way kilowatt-hours are the unit for electricity sold through wires.
Licensed operators produced about 16,379 thousand Gcal in 2025. Apartment heating bills are usually charged by floor area rather than by measured Gcal, which is why your bill does not change when you open a window.
Mongolia has 1,936 MW installed and a peak of 1,743.2 MW. Is that enough?
It looks like a comfortable margin, and it is not. Installed capacity counts every machine on paper, including units under repair, old units that cannot reach their rating, and solar and wind that produce nothing at the winter evening peak.
The peak also already includes imported power. That is why the country imports on the coldest evenings instead of running on its own plants alone.
Does a battery station generate electricity?
No. A battery moves electricity through time. It charges when power is plentiful and cheap, then discharges at the evening peak. It adds no new energy to the system.
That is why storage is written with two numbers: power (MW, how fast it can push) and energy (MWh, how long it can keep pushing).
Who runs the system
Mongolia does not have an electricity market in the way it has a food market. One state buyer sits in the middle of everything, and a regulator sets the price.
Who owns the power plants?
The state, almost entirely. The big coal plants, the transmission grid, the dispatch centre and the distribution companies are separate state-owned joint stock companies. The Ministry of Energy holds 70 percent of the shares in each and the State Property Agency holds the rest.
State companies produce more than 90 percent of the country's electricity. Private owners appear mainly in wind and solar plants, small heat producers and parts of distribution.
Who decides what I pay for electricity and heat?
The Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC). It licenses energy companies, approves the tariff for each licensed activity, and publishes the tariff tables that your bill is calculated from.
The commission was created by the Energy Law of 2001 and has five commissioners appointed by the Prime Minister. Tariff changes go through a public hearing procedure before they take effect.
Can I choose my electricity supplier?
No. Households and small businesses are served by the one licensed supplier for their region, at the tariff the regulator approved. There is no competition for your custom and no cheaper provider to switch to.
The Energy Law allows only very large consumers, above a load threshold the regulator sets, to buy under a negotiated contract instead of the regulated tariff.
If there is no market, how does electricity get bought and sold?
Through a single buyer. The National Dispatching Centre, the state body that balances the grid second by second, also runs its trading. The Energy Law gives it that role: it directs the commercial activity of the unified grid and signs the contracts for power that independent producers feed into it. Generators do not compete for customers and there is no spot market or power exchange.
The centre buys at regulated prices and resells to the regional distribution companies, which sell to you. Older reports place the buying role at the transmission company, which is where it sat in earlier years.
What law does all this run on?
The Energy Law, adopted on 1 February 2001. It broke the old single state utility into separate licensed activities: generation, transmission, dispatch, distribution and supply. A company licensed for one of them is barred from holding a conflicting licence.
The law is amended often. The most recent changes, on 3 July 2026, rewrote parts of the licensing rules. What has not happened is the bigger rewrite: the governance and tariff reform bill that a national energy reform committee has been preparing since 2024 is not adopted, so the 2001 structure still stands.
Who owns the wires that reach my home?
Two different companies. The high-voltage transmission grid between provinces belongs to the national transmission company. The low-voltage network in your city or province belongs to your regional distribution company, which is also the one that reads your meter and sends the bill.
In Ulaanbaatar that distribution company is the Ulaanbaatar Electricity Distribution Network.
How does a private wind or solar farm sell its electricity?
Through a power purchase agreement with the state buyer, usually for twenty years or more. The price in that agreement, not a market price, is what the project lives on, which is why the terms of these agreements matter so much.
Since 2024 the Ministry of Energy has moved new renewable projects from negotiated agreements to competitive auctions, where developers bid the price down against each other.
My bill looks wrong, or my power keeps cutting out. Who do I go to?
Start with the company that bills you: in Ulaanbaatar that is the city distribution network, which runs a 24 hour line for outages and an online account for bills.
If the company does not resolve it, the Energy Regulatory Commission runs a consumer complaint system for disputes over bills, tariffs, service quality and disconnection.
Where your power comes from
Coal plants built two generations ago, plus imports at the edges. That is the honest summary of the 2025 numbers.
What actually generates Mongolia's electricity?
Coal, overwhelmingly. Of the 9,911.9 GWh generated inside the country in 2025, thermal plants produced 9,034.3 GWh. Wind added 532.6 GWh, solar 288.7 GWh and hydro 56.2 GWh.
That puts renewables at 8.9 percent of domestic generation. The share of capacity is higher than the share of electricity, because wind and solar plants stand idle for much of the day.
Why does Mongolia import 21.4 percent of its electricity?
Because domestic plants cannot cover the winter evening peak, and because two of the four regional systems were never connected to the main grid. Mongolia imported 2,700.5 GWh in 2025, mostly from Russia in the north and west and from China in the south and east.
Imports are not a temporary emergency measure. They have been a structural part of supply for years, and they are the reason the lights stay on during a cold snap.
Is Mongolia one national grid?
No. There are four systems: the Central Energy System around Ulaanbaatar, which carries the large majority of demand, plus the Western, the Eastern and the Altai-Uliastai systems.
The smaller systems sit hundreds of kilometres from the coal plants, so they lean on local hydro and on cross-border lines instead. Connecting them to the centre is one of the main goals of current grid projects.
How old are the plants keeping the country running?
The backbone is Soviet era. Ulaanbaatar's CHP-2 dates from the early 1960s, CHP-3 from the late 1960s, and CHP-4, the largest single plant in the country, was built through the 1980s with later additions.
Old plants break down more often and are harder to repair. That is why a single unit failure in January becomes a national news story.
What happens when a big plant fails?
Both electricity and heat are affected at once, because the same plants make both. A fire on the night of 1 June 2025 struck Ulaanbaatar's CHP-3, a plant the ministry credits with about a third of the city's district heat and roughly a seventh of national electricity, and which also sells steam to industry. One worker died.
The system covers the gap with imports, with reserve units and, if that is not enough, by restricting supply to some consumers.
Why is winter the dangerous season for the grid?
Everything peaks at once. Heating load, lighting load and industrial load all rise, the coldest evenings push demand to its annual maximum, and solar output is at its weakest exactly then.
The reported winter peak reached 1,743.2 MW in 2025, against 1,936 MW of installed capacity on paper. The gap between those two numbers is thinner than it looks once repairs and imports are counted.
Why do power cuts happen, and are they planned?
Some are planned: a distribution company switches off a district to repair a line, and announces it in advance. Some are local faults in your own street or building.
The serious kind is system-wide: generation cannot meet demand, so the dispatch centre sheds load in blocks to keep the whole grid from collapsing. Those are the ones that follow a plant failure or an extreme cold snap.
Does the Oyu Tolgoi mine run on Mongolian electricity?
Historically no. The mine has been supplied with imported power from the Inner Mongolian grid in China, bought through the Mongolian grid company and resold to the mine.
That has not changed. In September 2026 members of parliament were still describing the mine as running on Chinese electricity. The domestic replacement, a power plant at Tavan Tolgoi now planned as a 300 MW first phase, broke ground on 4 May 2026 after years of failed tenders, and is targeted to start up in 2028.
What you pay
Tariffs are public. They are also below what the energy actually costs to produce, which is the single fact that explains most arguments about Mongolian energy.
What does a household pay per kilowatt-hour right now?
On the central and southern grid, with an ordinary meter, the regulator's current table charges 184 MNT per kWh for the first 150 kWh in a month, 269 MNT between 150 and 300 kWh, and 299 MNT above 300 kWh. A monthly base charge of 3,360 MNT applies. These figures exclude VAT, which your bill adds on top, and they already include a renewable support levy of 13.48 MNT per kWh.
The more you use, the higher the rate on the extra units. The design is deliberate: it protects small users and charges heavy users closer to cost.
Why did my electricity bill jump?
Tariffs did not change at all between 2019 and November 2024. Then the regulator moved them toward real cost: the average tariff went from 216 to 280 MNT per kWh, households moved from a flat 140 MNT rate to the three-step scale, and business tariffs rose about 30 percent on average.
The regulator's own example: a household using the national average of 220 kWh a month went from 36,220 MNT to 52,107 MNT. Heating tariffs followed in 2025. Five years of frozen prices arriving at once is what the jump felt like.
How is apartment heating charged in Ulaanbaatar?
By floor area, not by how warm you keep the flat. The regulator's current table for Ulaanbaatar households sets apartment heating at 531 MNT per square metre per month, or 3,592 MNT per gigajoule where a meter is installed, plus a monthly heat service charge that rises with the size of the flat.
Hot water is billed separately, either per person, by measured water volume, or by meter. All these figures exclude VAT, which your bill adds on top. A 50 square metre flat therefore pays about 26,550 MNT of heating plus a 5,775 MNT service charge before VAT and before hot water.
Do these tariffs cover what energy costs to produce?
No. Even after the 2024 and 2025 increases, the tariff is below the cost of supply. The World Bank warned that the sector's financial deficit could reach around a third of system costs by the end of 2025.
That gap is why plants struggle to fund repairs and why new capacity depends on loans, budget allocations and donor programmes rather than on revenue from customers.
If I pay less than cost, who pays the rest?
The state, through the budget, and the energy companies themselves, through deferred maintenance and debt. A subsidy is not free money: it is a bill paid later, usually as an older grid and an emergency repair in January.
It also flows unevenly. Before the 2024 reform, mining and industry paid close to cost while households paid roughly half of it, so the subsidy went mostly to homes.
What is the ger district night electricity discount?
In the heating season, ger district households get free electricity at night up to a monthly cap, so that electric heating competes with a coal stove. A government resolution of 26 February 2025 extended the window from 21:00-06:00 to 21:00-09:00.
The same resolution raised the monthly cap from 700 to 1,500 kWh for standard connections and from 1,500 to 3,000 kWh for higher-capacity connections. Those were still the rules when this page was checked in September 2026.
Is there a cheaper tariff for low-income households?
Yes. Households registered as needing social welfare support pay a separate, lower tariff: 90 MNT per kWh up to 100 kWh a month and 110 MNT above that. They were also exempted from the November 2024 increase.
Can I pay less by shifting when I use power?
Yes, with a time-of-use meter. On the current household table, the night rate is 119 MNT per kWh while the evening peak between 17:00 and 21:00 costs 294 to 315 MNT. Washing and charging at night is the cheapest hour of the day.
The same signal is what the whole system needs. Every kilowatt-hour moved out of the evening peak is a kilowatt-hour that does not have to be imported or covered by an old unit.
Do tariff rises show up in the cost of living?
Yes, directly. The IMF linked the November 2024 electricity increase to a sharp rise in housing and utility inflation, and noted that it weighs most on lower-income households, who spend a larger share of their income on utilities.
That is the real trade-off in energy pricing: a tariff below cost hides the bill inside the state budget, and a tariff at cost puts it in the household budget.
Heat, ger districts and winter air
Heating is the harder half of the energy problem. It is also where the air pollution comes from.
Who is connected to district heating, and who is not?
Apartment blocks in Ulaanbaatar and in provincial centres are connected to heat networks fed by combined heat and power plants and heat-only boilers. Ulaanbaatar's network runs on hundreds of kilometres of pipe from Amgalan and the three CHP plants.
Ger district households are not connected. They heat with stoves, which is why the same winter evening produces both a demand peak on the grid and a smoke layer over the city.
Where does Ulaanbaatar's winter smog actually come from?
Mostly from stoves, not from the power plants. Development bank programme documents attribute roughly four fifths of winter fine-particle pollution to household coal burning in ger districts, with traffic and the power and heat plants accounting for far smaller shares. That measurement was taken before the 2019 fuel ban, so the split has moved since, but the ranking has not.
Tall plant chimneys disperse emissions high above the city. A stove chimney releases them at the height people breathe, inside a valley that traps cold air.
Did the 2019 raw coal ban work?
Partly, and measurably. From May 2019 households in Ulaanbaatar were barred from burning raw coal and moved onto manufactured refined briquettes. Monitoring after the first winter showed fine-particle levels roughly half of those three winters earlier.
The drop also coincided with a cold, unusual winter and with the start of the pandemic, so not all of it belongs to the ban. Air in the ger districts is still far from clean.
Why not just move ger districts onto electric heating?
Because the grid would have to carry it. Heating a ger with electricity through a Mongolian winter uses far more power than a household normally draws, and the local lines, transformers and generation would all need to grow to match.
The free night electricity scheme is the policy answer for now: it pushes that new load into the hours when the system has room, instead of adding it to the evening peak.
When does the heating season start and end?
In practice it runs from mid September to mid May, and the city authorities confirm the start date each autumn based on the weather. Tariff discounts and subsidy programmes are usually tied to the same window.
Why is a heat shortage also an electricity problem?
Because the same plants make both. To deliver more heat on a cold day, a CHP plant runs its boilers harder, and that choice changes how much electricity it can send to the grid at the same moment.
It also works the other way. A city that adds thousands of new apartments adds heat demand to plants that were sized for a smaller city decades ago.
What is being built
New coal, new wind and solar, new batteries and new lines are all happening at once. Their sizes are very different.
What is the biggest new power plant?
The Booroljuut coal plant east of Ulaanbaatar. Its first 150 MW unit started up in late 2024 and the second followed in October 2025, giving 300 MW in total, with further phases proposed at the same site.
It is the clearest sign of the current strategy: renewables are growing, but the capacity added for the winter peak is still coal.
Mongolia has huge wind and sun. Why is renewable output still 8.9 percent?
Three reasons, all about the system rather than the resource. The grid can only absorb so much variable power before it needs backup; the coal plants that provide that backup must keep running for heat; and without storage, midday solar has nowhere to go.
State policy targets renewables at 30 percent of installed capacity by 2030. Note the word capacity: that target can be met while the share of electricity actually generated stays much lower.
What is the renewable auction everyone is talking about?
A change in how projects are chosen. Instead of negotiating a price with one developer, the ministry now runs a competition where bidders offer the lowest price for a defined site and capacity.
The first round finished in 2026. Five solar plants paired with batteries, about 220 MW of solar and 135 MW of storage in total, were selected across five provinces, and the purchase agreements were signed on 1 July 2026 with a target of running before the winter peak. Pairing matters: a solar plant with a battery can still deliver power into the evening peak, which a bare solar plant cannot.
Do batteries actually help a coal grid?
Yes, in a specific way. Mongolia's first grid-scale battery at Songino, rated 80 MW and 200 MWh, has been running since December 2023. It charges when there is surplus and discharges into the evening peak.
That reduces imports and takes stress off old units at the worst hour of the day. It does not add energy, and a battery of this size cannot heat a city.
What about hydro power?
Small today: hydro produced 56.2 GWh in 2025, from plants like Durgun and Taishir in the west. The largest project under construction is the 90 MW Erdeneburen plant on the Khovd river, intended to supply the western provinces.
Mongolian rivers freeze and run low in winter, so hydro output falls exactly when demand is highest. That is why it supports the system rather than leading it.
Is Mongolia getting nuclear power?
Not yet, and not soon. Mongolia has no nuclear plant and no construction decision. What it does have is uranium: a thirty-year agreement signed in January 2025 covers mining the Zuuvch-Ovoo deposit for export.
Small modular reactors come up regularly in policy discussion. Treat them as discussion until a site, a financing package and a licence exist.
Will the Russia-China gas pipeline heat Mongolian homes?
There is no pipeline yet. The Power of Siberia 2 route through Mongolia has been discussed for years, the buyer and seller have not agreed terms, and no construction timeline exists.
Even if it is built, a transit pipeline is not the same as a domestic gas supply. Mongolia has no gas distribution network for homes today.
Who pays for all this new construction?
The state budget, development bank loans and grants, and private investors under power purchase agreements. Each type of money comes with different conditions, and the three are often mixed inside one project.
The funding screen of this atlas lists the programmes, budget projects and work packages behind the current spending, with the reported amounts and contractors.
How to read energy news
Announcements, licences, budgets and plants are four different things. Most confusing headlines mix them up.
Why do project counts and megawatt totals never match between sources?
Because they count different objects. A financing programme can pay for work in twenty provinces. A budget project sits inside it. A procurement package sits inside that. One power station can appear in all three, plus in a licence register, plus as two separate phases.
Adding them gives a bigger, wrong number. This atlas keeps the three layers separate and never sums a parent with its children.
When a project says "operating", is it producing power right now?
Not necessarily. "Operating" is a reported lifecycle stage: the plant was accepted and entered service. It says nothing about whether a unit is under repair today.
Live output is a different kind of data, published by the dispatch centre, not by a project register.
Why do two official documents give one plant two different capacities?
Because a plant can be rated by its turbines, by its generators, or by what the grid is allowed to take from it. The three numbers rarely match, and each document picks one without saying which.
When sources disagree, this atlas keeps both figures visible instead of quietly choosing a winner.
"A 100 MW solar farm." How much electricity is that in a year?
Roughly a fifth of what the nameplate suggests, because the sun sets and winter days are short. Mongolia's operating solar plants ran at about that rate in 2025. Use the national figures as a sanity check: all of Mongolia's solar plants together produced 288.7 GWh in 2025, and all wind farms 532.6 GWh.
The same check works in the other direction. Coal plants produced 9,034.3 GWh in the same year, which is why a single new wind farm does not change the mix.
A new plant is announced. What should I check before believing it?
Four things, in order: is there a signed power purchase agreement, is the money committed rather than "proposed", has construction physically started, and has a commissioning date been set by the state acceptance commission.
A memorandum, a feasibility study and a groundbreaking ceremony are three separate milestones, and many projects stop between them.
Where do the numbers on this site come from?
From public documents: the Energy Regulatory Commission annual statistics, the Ministry of Energy project dashboard and notices, licence registers, development bank project records, environmental assessments and procurement awards. Every record carries its source and the date that source was published.
The research edition covers 41 researched stations and 162 energy records. It is a working inventory, not a complete national census.
How can I check a claim myself?
Start with the Energy Regulatory Commission annual statistics for anything about capacity, generation, heat or tariffs. Use the Ministry of Energy dashboard for project budgets and progress. Use the national statistics office for the electricity balance.
If a number has no document behind it, treat it as a claim rather than a fact. That rule is the whole method behind this atlas.
Words you will see
The terms used in news reports, tariff notices and this atlas, in plain language.
- Capacity (MW)
- The most a plant can produce at one moment. A ceiling, not an output.
- Generation (GWh)
- The electricity a plant actually produced over a period, usually a year.
- Peak load
- The highest demand the system has to meet, in Mongolia a cold winter evening.
- CHP plant
- A plant that makes electricity and district heat together from the same fuel.
- Transmission
- The high-voltage lines that move bulk power between provinces.
- Distribution
- The local network that brings power to your street and reads your meter.
- Dispatch
- Second-by-second balancing of what is generated against what is used.
- Single buyer
- One state entity that buys all generated power and resells it onward.
- PPA
- The long contract that fixes the price a plant is paid for its electricity.
- Tariff
- The regulated price per unit that a licensed company may charge you.
- Cross-subsidy
- One group of customers paying above cost so another can pay below it.
- Load shedding
- Cutting supply to part of the network on purpose to save the whole system.
- BESS
- A battery storage station, rated in both MW of power and MWh of energy.
- Gcal and GJ
- Units of heat. Heat tariffs and heat statistics use one or the other.
- Curtailment
- Telling a wind or solar plant to produce less because the grid cannot take it.
- Commissioning
- The testing stage between construction finishing and full commercial operation.
See the numbers for yourself.
Every claim on this page traces back to a public document. The atlas maps the stations behind them, and the funding screen lists the money.