Step up, Three Gorges Dam. China’s latest colossal infrastructure project, if completed, will be the world’s largest hydroelectric dam, high on the Tibetan plateau on the border with India.
China says the Motuo Hydro Station it is building in Tibet is key to its efforts to meet clean energy goals. Beijing also sees infrastructure projects as a way to stimulate China’s sluggish economy and create jobs.
But the project has raised concerns among environmentalists and China’s neighbors — in part because Beijing has said so little about it.
The area where the dam is being built is prone to earthquakes. The Tibetan river that has been dammed, the Yarlung Tsangpo, flows into neighboring India as the Brahmaputra and into Bangladesh as the Jamuna, raising water security concerns in those countries.
What is known about the project?
China announced in late December that the government had approved construction of the Motuo project in the lower reaches of the Yarlung Tsangpo, but released few details about it. This includes the cost of the project, where the money will come from, what companies are involved and how many people are likely to be displaced.
It is known that the dam will be in Medog County, Tibet, in a steep canyon where the river makes a horseshoe bend known as the Big Bend and then drops about 6,500 feet over roughly 30 miles.
By harnessing the kinetic energy of this drop, the hydroelectric station could generate 300 billion kilowatt-hours of energy per year, a state-owned facility owned by Power Construction in China, or Powerchina, in 2020. This would be three times the capacity of the Three Three Gorges Dam, currently the largest in the world, which cost China about $34 billion to build.
China has not disclosed which company is building the dam, but some analysts say Powerchina, the country’s largest builder of hydropower infrastructure, is most likely involved. The company did not respond to requests for comment.
Experts say construction in the Great Bend, a 500-meter-deep canyon with no roads, would likely take a decade due to engineering challenges.
Even the basic design of the dam is unknown.
According to Fan Xiao, a senior engineer at the Sichuan Bureau of Geology who spoke to The New York Times, one proposal he saw as a likely approach involved building a dam near the top of the Great Bend and diverting the water through huge tunnels drilled into the canyon.
China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, has promised that the country’s carbon emissions will peak around 2030 as it replaces coal with renewable energy sources. The ruling Communist Party, which uses massive public works projects to showcase its technical prowess, has been studying ways to harness Yarlung Tsangpo’s power for years.
Are there environmental risks?
The same forces that created a major bending risk for the dam are building on it. The Tibetan Plateau was formed by the collision between the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates millions of years ago. To this day, the Indian plate is slowly moving towards the Eurasian one, and therefore the Himalayas are regularly hit by earthquakes.
Such seismic events threaten the safety of dams. Chinese officials said five hydropower dams in Tibet had developed cracks 7.1 magnitude earthquake hits near Shigatse city He has killed more than 120 people this month.
Although the Motuo Dam is built well enough to withstand earthquakes, the landslides and mudslides resulting from the tremors are difficult to kill and can kill people living nearby. Experts say the massive excavations involved in dam construction could make such disasters more likely.
What about the people living there?
It is difficult to know how the project is received by Tibetans and members of other smaller ethnic groups who live in the area. Tibet is tightly controlled by the Communist Party, which encouraged the Han Chinese to move to the plateau and strictly control the practice of Tibetan Buddhism. Tibet is open to foreigners only by permit and is usually off limits to foreign journalists.
In the past, Tibetans have staged protests against hydropower dam projects that threatened to displace them, including a demonstration last year in Sichuan province, according to the report.
The Motuo Dam project is expected to bring more changes to Medog, which was once China’s most remote county. The government has built highways into the region that have attracted tourists and adventure travelers in recent years, according to Matthew Akester, an India-based Tibet researcher.
Now people will have to be relocated to make way for the dam, which may require submerging farmland and towns. It is unclear how many people could be affected. Medog has a population of 15,000.
Tibet, which is huge but sparsely populated, does not need a lot of energy, and the dam’s estimated capacity would also exceed what neighboring provinces require, Fan said. Nearby Sichuan and Yunnan have many hydroelectric plants and produce more energy than the region needs. And sending a force long distances to other parts of China would be expensive.
How are India and Bangladesh responding?
The dam could affect people living downstream in the Indian states of Arunachal Pradesh and Assam, as well as Bangladesh. If the dam trapped sediment, it would make the land along the river downstream less fertile and erode the banks and coastlines in India, he said Dr. Kalyan Rudra, Professor of River Science and Chairman of the West Bengal Board of Control, a Govt.
Scientists in India and Bangladesh have asked China to share details of its plans so they can better assess the project’s risks. Indian diplomats have also urged Beijing to ensure that the project does not harm downstream states. China says it has taken measures to prevent negative consequences for its neighbors.
China’s secrecy fosters mistrust, said Genevieve Donnellon-May, a researcher at the UK’s Oxford Global Society who studies water policy and environmental conflict. “Without Beijing releasing hydrological data and detailed plans for the dam, India and Bangladesh are left in the dark, making it harder to prepare to mitigate any potential impacts,” she said.
Both China and India have accused each other of trying to exert control over water resources for strategic or economic gain—what some experts and officials call “hydro-hegemony.” The dam could be seen as a way to project Chinese power nearby Disputed border with Indiaincluding in Arunachal Pradesh, which China claims as its territory.
Because it is upstream, “China can make decisions that directly affect the flow of water downstream, raising concerns in India,” Ms Donnellon-May said.
Some officials in India have proposed building a large dam in a tributary of the Brahmaputra to store the water and counter any reduction in flow that the Tibet dam might cause. Dr. However, Rudra of the West Bengal Pollution Control Board said such a dam could cause the same problems of soil fertility and erosion.
Saif Hasnat contributed reporting. If contributed research.
