A practical view of solar energy, industrial self-consumption, BESS, and grid integration across Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Central Asia, based on experience delivering the First Light industrial solar power plant in Rustavi, Georgia.
Her Story
About Lela
I have always been drawn to industries where decisions carry real consequences. Energy, infrastructure, manufacturing, and construction are not abstract businesses. They demand discipline, accountability, and the ability to deliver under pressure.
My professional path began in major international energy and infrastructure environments. Those early years shaped the way I lead today. I learned that scale means nothing without precision, that ambitious projects fail through small operational weaknesses, and that leadership is tested most severely when circumstances are uncertain.
My transition into renewable energy was not accidental. I saw an industry with enormous potential, but also one that too often separated manufacturing, engineering, commercial promises, and project execution. I wanted to build a company capable of taking responsibility across those boundaries.
That objective became ASTORIOS.
I do not view my role as limited to corporate strategy or representation. I remain closely involved in negotiations, technical coordination, project risk, procurement, construction, commissioning, and client relationships. For me, leadership requires proximity to the work. Decisions are better when the person making them understands their operational consequences.
My education in biophysics, law, and business management has also shaped my approach. I naturally examine issues from several angles: technical feasibility, commercial logic, contractual exposure, and long-term strategic value. This multidisciplinary perspective is particularly important in renewable energy, where engineering, regulation, finance, and execution are inseparable.
I believe sustainability must be commercially credible. A renewable energy project should reduce environmental impact, but it must also improve energy security, strengthen industrial competitiveness, and perform reliably throughout its operating life.
I also care deeply about the visibility of women in energy, manufacturing, engineering, and infrastructure. These sectors remain heavily male-dominated, but competence has no gender. Representation matters most when it is supported by measurable results, operational authority and real responsibility.
My leadership philosophy is simple: set demanding standards, remain accountable, and never forget that no serious achievement is built by one person alone. Strong companies are created by teams whose members understand that their work matters and that excellence is expected from everyone.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Lela
01What do you attribute your success to?
I attribute my success to discipline, resilience, and the willingness to remain accountable when circumstances become difficult. My career has developed in industries where details matter, mistakes are expensive, and results cannot be replaced by presentation. That taught me to prepare thoroughly, calculate risk, stay close to execution, and continue learning.
I have also refused to exchange long-term reputation for a short-term win, even when maintaining quality and professional standards was commercially more difficult.
At the same time, I do not believe success is self-made. Every meaningful achievement has been built with people who brought different expertise, challenged my thinking, and took ownership of the result. My responsibility as a leader is to create an environment where capable people feel respected, trusted, and empowered to contribute their best work.
Hard work created opportunities. Judgment, integrity, resilience, and the right team turned those opportunities into lasting results.
02What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
The best career advice I have received can be reduced to one principle: never sacrifice your long-term reputation for a short-term result.
Markets change, titles pass, and individual transactions are eventually forgotten. People remember whether you kept your word, maintained your standards, delivered what you promised, and accepted responsibility when conditions became difficult.
That principle has shaped the way I lead. I do not believe in business heroism or impulsive decisions disguised as courage. I believe in understanding the problem, calculating the risk, and then acting decisively.
Build competence before visibility. Build systems before scale. Build a team, not a hierarchy. A serious career is not created by one dramatic success; it is built through a consistent sequence of decisions that makes people trust you with greater responsibility.
03What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
Do not enter the industry trying to prove that a woman belongs there. Enter determined to master the work.
Learn the technology, project economics, contracts, construction risks, and commercial realities. In energy and infrastructure, visibility without competence has a very short life. Prepare thoroughly, ask precise questions, and do not pretend to understand something you have not yet learned.
At the same time, do not assume that succeeding in a male-dominated industry requires becoming a copy of the men around you. Empathy, emotional intelligence, and femininity are not professional weaknesses. They become strengths when combined with knowledge, clear boundaries, demanding standards, and the courage to make difficult decisions.
Do not wait until you feel completely ready. Very few people do. Accept responsibility, keep learning, and allow your results to establish your authority. Protect your reputation carefully; it will outlast any title or transaction.
And when you are underestimated, do not waste energy trying to persuade everyone otherwise. Work calmly, deliver consistently, and let the outcome correct their judgment.
04What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
The renewable energy industry no longer suffers from a lack of technology. Its central challenge is the ability to integrate, finance, and operate that technology at scale.
Grid congestion, interconnection delays, permitting, curtailment, regulatory uncertainty, and limited access to affordable long-term capital are increasingly more serious constraints than the availability of solar modules. More than 2,500 GW of generation, storage, and large-load projects are currently stalled in grid queues worldwide, while grid investment continues to lag behind investment in generation.
Solar manufacturing also faces severe price pressure and overcapacity. Low equipment prices can accelerate deployment, but they can also obscure major differences in product quality, warranty strength, engineering competence and long-term bankability.
The opportunity is therefore shifting from selling individual products to delivering integrated energy infrastructure. Solar combined with battery energy storage, intelligent energy management, grid flexibility, and disciplined EPC execution can provide industrial customers with lower energy costs, greater resilience, and stronger energy security. Battery costs have continued to decline, making solar-plus-storage increasingly commercially viable.
The companies that will create lasting value are not necessarily those that sell the cheapest equipment. They will be those capable of combining manufacturing, engineering, storage, financing, construction, and lifecycle accountability into one bankable solution.
Her Content Hub
Articles by Lela
Solar Energy in the Caucasus and Central Asia: The Grid Will Decide the Pace
Solar development is accelerating across the region. The harder work now lies in grid modernization, industrial integration, energy storage and getting projects connected—not merely announced.
Solar Energy in the Caucasus and Central Asia: The Grid Will Decide the Pace
By Lela Kurtanidze, CEO of ASTORIOS Holding Inc.
I have lost count of the meetings where forty minutes were spent discussing modules, inverters, and electricity yield, followed by five minutes on the connection point.
In the Caucasus and Central Asia, that order should usually be reversed.
A solar project can have excellent irradiation, competitive equipment, and an interested investor. None of it matters if the proposed substation has no available capacity, the transmission line is already constrained, or the connection conditions remain uncertain when construction is supposed to begin.
This is becoming the defining issue for renewable energy development across the region.
A Grid Built for a Different Model
Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, together with Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan, inherited electricity systems designed largely during the Soviet period. Those networks were not poorly conceived. They supplied cities, mines, factories, and heavy industrial operations for decades.
They were, however, built for a different model: relatively few large generating stations, centralised system control, and electricity moving in predictable directions toward major consumers.
Solar power changes that pattern. So do rooftop generation, private power plants, battery energy storage systems, and industrial facilities that want to generate electricity behind the meter. Power flows become less predictable. Consumers can become generators. A factory's changing production schedule can affect how much solar power its internal network can absorb at any particular moment.
Parts of the regional infrastructure are now being asked to perform functions that were never part of their original design.
That does not mean solar development must wait until every transmission line and substation has been reconstructed. It does mean that grid modernisation must run alongside the new generation. Modern protection systems, digital substations, SCADA, accurate forecasting, transparent connection studies, and clearly defined rules for battery energy storage are no longer secondary matters.
The Countries Are Moving at Different Speeds
Armenia
Armenia entered distributed solar earlier than most of its neighbours. By May 2025, installed solar capacity had exceeded 870 MW, with household installations accounting for approximately 485 MW. Solar generation had grown from almost nothing in 2015 to nearly 1 TWh in 2024.
That early growth created local experience and a real market. It also exposed the next layer of work: transmission rehabilitation, smarter distribution management, and the ability to accommodate a much larger number of generators.
Azerbaijan
Azerbaijan has taken a more centrally coordinated route. The 230 MW Garadagh Solar Power Plant was commissioned in 2023 with a dedicated 330 kV connection substation. More recently, Azerbaijan constructed the digital 330 kV Shafag substation specifically to integrate the 240 MW Shafag Solar Power Plant in Jabrayil.
There is a practical lesson in that. Generation and evacuation infrastructure were treated as parts of the same project, rather than dealing with the grid after the solar plant had already been developed.
Georgia
Georgia is at another stage. Smaller solar installations are no longer unusual, but the move into industrial-scale and utility-scale solar is only now gathering real momentum.
Georgia's electricity system benefits substantially from hydropower, but hydro production is seasonal, while demand - particularly industrial demand - does not always follow the same pattern. IRENA's 2025 assessment identified significant untapped solar and wind resources, while also pointing to grid integration, financing, governance, and local capacity as areas requiring further work.
On paper, Georgia's solar project pipeline is expanding quickly. In practice, the market will be decided by which projects have viable land, credible grid access, and customers or off takers able to use the electricity.
Industrial Self-Consumption
Industrial self-consumption deserves particular attention here.
A factory with a substantial daytime load may not need to export all - or any - of its solar generation. Electricity can be produced at the industrial site and consumed inside the facility. This reduces dependence on external supply and avoids adding uncontrolled generation to an already constrained connection point.
That sounds straightforward until the project reaches the commissioning stage.
At ASTORIOS, we encountered this directly while delivering the First Light Solar Power Plant for Rustavi Azot in Georgia. First Light is an approximately 24 MWp industrial self-consumption project covering 29 hectares, with 34,424 photovoltaic modules, 100 string inverters, and four substations.
It was engineered as a zero-export plant: the electricity generated is used by the industrial consumer rather than being pushed into the national grid.
The difficult part was never proving that the modules could generate electricity. The difficult part was making a large variable power source behave correctly inside an operating chemical plant.
Industrial loads do not remain perfectly stable. Production units stop and restart. Substations may be taken out of service. Consumption changes according to the factory's operating requirements - not according to the solar forecast.
When part of the factory load disappears, the solar plant must recognise the change and reduce generation fast enough to prevent backflow. That involves active power control, reliable communications, protection coordination, accurate metering, and an understanding of the customer's electrical system that goes well beyond installing photovoltaic equipment.
A small alteration in factory operation can matter more on that day than another decimal point in the annual yield model.
First Light is relevant because it shows one way of proceeding where grid-export capacity is limited. Industrial self-consumption and zero-export control allow substantial solar generation to be installed without waiting for the wider network to absorb the full plant output. The project was also prepared for future BESS integration to support load stability, peak management, and resilience.
This approach will not suit every industrial consumer. A business needs adequate daytime consumption, usable electrical infrastructure, and accurate load data. A factory operating intermittently cannot be modelled in the same way as a continuous industrial process.
Still, for manufacturers in Georgia and across the wider region, industrial solar offers a credible route to lower electricity exposure and reduced carbon intensity while national grid upgrades continue.
Central Asia Is Moving at a Much Larger Scale
Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan ended 2025 with 162 renewable energy facilities totalling approximately 3.5 GW, including 49 solar power plants. Renewables accounted for around 7% of national electricity generation.
Kazakhstan's geography makes transmission impossible to treat as an afterthought. Strong solar or wind resources may be located far from the major load centres. The commercial viability of a project, therefore, depends not only on production cost, but also on where the electricity must travel and what network reinforcement is required.
Uzbekistan
Uzbekistan has accelerated more aggressively. During 2025, it commissioned five solar plants totalling 1,413 MW and ten battery energy storage facilities totalling 1,245 MW. The same programme included 1,614 MVA of new substation capacity and approximately 420 kilometres of distribution networks.
That last point matters. Uzbekistan has not treated solar generation, BESS, and network infrastructure as entirely separate conversations. The speed creates execution risks, but the direction is correct: storage and grid investment have to accompany generation.
Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan
Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan enter the discussion from a hydropower-heavy position. Solar can complement hydro production, particularly where water availability and seasonal demand do not align. It can also support remote loads and reduce pressure on constrained networks. Turkmenistan remains early in its solar development, although work is underway on a national solar roadmap, pilot projects, and local technical capacity.
Regional electricity trade may eventually become as important as individual national programmes. Today, cross-border electricity trade accounts for only about 3% of Central Asian demand. The World Bank's REMIT programme is intended to establish the region's first formal electricity market, strengthen transmission, and support large-scale renewable energy integration.
Where Projects Succeed or Fail
For developers, investors, and industrial consumers, the practical questions remain fairly basic.
- Where is the connection point?
- What happens when the consumer's load changes?
- Who is responsible for the grid study?
- Is the proposed BESS solving a measurable problem?
- Who will operate the plant after handover?
- And are the connection conditions firm enough to justify construction expenditure?
These questions are less attractive in a presentation than installed megawatts and carbon-reduction forecasts. They are also where projects succeed or fail.
My view is straightforward: I would rather commission 10 MW that the network and consumer can use reliably than announce 100 MW that never leaves the spreadsheet.
The Caucasus and Central Asia do not need more theoretical solar potential. They need connected plants, modernised infrastructure, and people capable of operating both.
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