Armenia fixed the grid by upgrading the weakest nodes first

Armenia's transmission grid was still carrying Soviet-era weaknesses: old substations, outage-prone lines and manual switching at critical nodes. The obvious but expensive answer was to rebuild the grid broadly.

HVEN and the World Bank instead sequenced the work around the backbone assets most likely to break. The Electricity Supply Reliability Project began in 2011 with high-voltage lines and key substations; later work extended the model to more substations serving residential and industrial loads.

The operating move was to pair concrete assets with control. Ashnak moved from manual switching to computerized systems, while HVEN strengthened planning, safety, environmental practice and day-to-day maintenance.

The reported results were sharp: outages on targeted line sections fell 57%, key-substation breakdowns fell 50%, and YTPC, Ashnak and Ararat-2 recorded zero equipment failures in their final reporting year.

Fix the failure nodes, not the average grid

Targeting the worst nodes concentrated money where reliability gains were largest.

Computerized switching removed slow, risky manual work from critical substations.

Maintenance and safety practices made the hardware upgrade repeatable after construction.

Sequencing work across substations reduced the risk that repairs would disrupt supply.

When a network fails at a few fragile nodes, reliability comes faster from targeted upgrades plus operating discipline than from a broad, even rebuild.

World Bank results reported 257 km of modernized transmission lines and improved service reliability for over 3 million people. A 2025 feature said Armenia had modernized nearly 75% of its substations, and new work will add real-time grid monitoring, automated protection and smart metering.