tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-50399103413388935062024-03-23T03:14:25.890-07:00International RiversWeiqi Zhanghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16657414981487705201noreply@blogger.comBlogger1244125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5039910341338893506.post-16789715984873998042014-11-19T17:31:00.000-08:002014-11-19T17:32:36.951-08:00NYT: Private Funding Brings a Boom in Hydropower, With High CostsA Dam Revival, Despite Risks
<br>Private Funding Brings a Boom in Hydropower, With High Costs
<br>By ERICA GIES, New York Times, NOV. 19, 2014
<br><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/20/business/energy-environment/private-funding-brings-a-boom-in-hydropower-with-high-costs.html?_r=0">www.nytimes.com/2014/11/20/business/energy-environment/private-funding-brings-a-boom-in-hydropower-with-high-costs.html?_r=0</a>
<br>
<br>While some dams in the United States and Europe are being
<br>decommissioned, a dam-building boom is underway in developing countries.
<br>It is a shift from the 1990s, when amid concerns about environmental
<br>impacts and displaced people, multilateral lenders like the World Bank
<br>backed away from large hydroelectric power projects.
<br>
<br>World hydropower production will grow from 4,000 terawatt hours now -
<br>about the annual power output of the United States - to 4,670 terawatt
<br>hours in 2020, according to Maria van der Hoeven, executive director of
<br>the International Energy Agency, in Paris. The Intergovernmental Panel
<br>on Climate Change predicts that hydropower generation will double in
<br>China between 2008 and 2035, and triple in India and Africa.
<br>
<br>The World Bank and other international lenders were the most important
<br>financiers of large dams before the '90s lull. But although the World
<br>Bank has in recent years increased its investment in hydropower from a
<br>low of just a few million dollars in 1999 to about $1.8 billion in 2014,
<br>it still funds only 2 percent of hydropower project investment today.
<br>
<br>Picking up the slack are national development banks from emerging
<br>countries such as China, Brazil, Thailand, and India, and private
<br>investors. Public-private partnerships are on the rise, generally with
<br>the support of regional development banks.
<br>
<br>"Who benefits from these infrastructure projects?" asked Jason Rainey,
<br>executive director of the anti-dam group International Rivers, in
<br>Berkeley, Calif.
<br>
<br>Some well-documented answers: The Xayaburi Dam in Laos will sell power
<br>to Thailand, while threatening the subsistence livelihoods of people who
<br>have long lived along the Mekong River; the Inga 3 dam in the Democratic
<br>Republic of Congo will sell power to mining companies and to South
<br>Africa, rather than to the 96 percent of Congolese who lack access to
<br>electricity.
<br>
<br>A 2012 report from International Rivers found that Chinese companies or
<br>financiers were involved in 308 dam projects in 70 different countries,
<br>many in Southeast Asia, but also some in Africa, Latin America and
<br>Pakistan. Aside from supplying electricity to investing countries,
<br>projects can also offer a type of vertical integration to power funders'
<br>industrial projects, such as mining or smelting. "China isn't the only
<br>one working this model," Mr. Rainey said: "The Brazilian Development
<br>Bank has financed more dam projects in Latin America than the
<br>Inter-American Development Bank. India is investing in hydropower in
<br>Nepal and Bhutan."
<br>
<br>Nancy Alexander, director of the Economic Governance Program for the
<br>Heinrich Boell Foundation, a public policy institute in Berlin, said she
<br>attributed this trend partly to a Group of 20 initiative that
<br>prioritized infrastructure investment as a path to economic stability.
<br>
<br>The initiative encourages joint financing by multilateral development
<br>banks and other sources. A World Bank report on hydropower this year
<br>said that the bank now "typically acts as a 'convener,' bringing other
<br>financiers to the table." It said that over the past five years, the
<br>World Bank Group had funded about half of the costs of projects that it
<br>financed, with the balance coming from host country governments, the
<br>private sector and other development banks.
<br>
<br>Ms. Alexander said the problem with this model is that it "derisks"
<br>mega-projects for the private sector and draws in institutional
<br>investors like pension funds and mutual funds. "Very often this means
<br>privatizing profits and outsourcing risks to the public," she said.
<br>
<br>Those risks can be both significant and hidden, she added. Project
<br>backers may cite national security or business confidentiality to avoid
<br>sharing information with the public.
<br>
<br>National development banks such as the Brazilian Development Bank, China
<br>Development Bank and the Development Bank of Southern Africa "have
<br>abysmal records in terms of transparency and in terms of social and
<br>environmental safeguards," Ms. Alexander said.
<br>
<br>The reduced involvement of global institutions allows countries to
<br>ignore international concerns. Although international backers have
<br>pulled out, for example, public-private funding has permitted Turkey to
<br>go ahead with its Ilisu Dam on the Tigris, defying Unesco's objections
<br>that it would flood Hasankeyf, a town with 10,000 years of history.
<br>Turkish dam projects have also played a role in drying out Iraqi
<br>wetlands downstream and exacerbating tensions in Syria.
<br>
<br>Yet, although dam investment is coming from diversified sources,
<br>activist organizations still look to the World Bank to set the standard
<br>for environmental and social protections. At the World Bank's annual
<br>meetings this autumn, 318 civil society organizations from 98 countries
<br>criticized its proposal for a new environmental and social framework,
<br>saying it would weaken existing safeguards. Among other things, they
<br>said, it would undermine the rights of indigenous people and of those
<br>displaced by projects, fail to protect workers or guarantee human rights
<br>and not meaningfully address climate change.
<br>
<br>"They have a lot of weasel language that softens and dampens
<br>safeguards," Mr. Rainey said.
<br>
<br>Amy Stilwell, a spokeswoman for the World Bank, said the proposal was
<br>just a starting point. A second phase of consultations, including those
<br>with the petitioning groups, will begin soon, with a second draft
<br>expected in 2015, she said.
<br>
<br>Part of the reason dams are back in favor, despite ongoing concerns, is
<br>the increasing awareness of climate change and the need for cleaner
<br>energy sources, said Ken Adams, president of the International
<br>Hydropower Association, an industry group based in London. Hydropower
<br>can also balance the electricity load and store energy to support
<br>intermittent renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar, he said.
<br>
<br>The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change supports hydropower to
<br>slow climate change, calling it a "proven, mature, predictable
<br>technology," in a 2011 report.
<br>
<br>Hydropower's reputation for low emissions, however, has come under
<br>scientific scrutiny in recent years. Reservoirs behind dams flood
<br>vegetation, which decays, releasing methane and soil carbon. A 2012
<br>study, in the journal Nature Climate Change, concluded that "emissions
<br>from tropical hydropower are often underestimated and can exceed those
<br>of fossil fuel for decades."
<br>
<br>The study emphasized that the effect is more pronounced in tropical
<br>ecosystems. Yet hydropower is typically presumed to be emission-free,
<br>Mr. Rainey said. "There is no mechanism within dam sanctioning
<br>processes, or any of the funding models, that methane emissions be
<br>monitored in dam projects," he said, adding that even carbon market
<br>instruments such as the Clean Development Mechanism help to fund large
<br>dams without considering their carbon footprints.
<br>
<br>Mr. Adams said his association's voluntary standards could offer a
<br>solution. Its Hydropower Sustainability Assessment Protocol, drafted
<br>with input from various stakeholders, including the World Bank, provides
<br>a framework for hydropower developers to monitor and benchmark their
<br>projects. William Rex, a hydropower specialist at the World Bank said:
<br>"We see it as a really useful tool."
<br>
<br>Mr. Adams said his association would like to see financial institutions
<br>encourage borrowers to use it. "Any energy source is going to have its
<br>good side and downside," said Mr. Adams. "But I believe that if done
<br>intelligently and appropriately, the downsides to hydro projects can be
<br>managed."
<br>________________________________________________
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<br>To be removed from the list, please visit:
<br><a href="http://org.salsalabs.com/o/2486/unsubscribe.jsp">http://org.salsalabs.com/o/2486/unsubscribe.jsp</a>Weiqi Zhanghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16657414981487705201noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5039910341338893506.post-7268307828483667072014-11-07T08:48:00.001-08:002014-11-07T08:48:40.799-08:00Hydropower May Be Huge Source of Methane EmissionsHydropower May Be Huge Source of Methane Emissions
<br>Oct 29, 2014 02:30 PM ET // by Bobby Magill, Climate Central
<br><a href="http://news.discovery.com/earth/global-warming/hydropower-may-be-huge-source-of-methane-emissions-141029.htm">http://news.discovery.com/earth/global-warming/hydropower-may-be-huge-source-of-methane-emissions-141029.htm</a>
<br>
<br>Imagine nearly 6,000 dairy cows doing what cows do, belching and being
<br>flatulent for a full year. That's how much methane was emitted from one
<br>Ohio reservoir in 2012.
<br>
<br>Reservoirs and hydropower are often thought of as climate friendly
<br>because they don't burn fossil fuels to produce electricity. But what if
<br>reservoirs that store water and produce electricity were among some of
<br>the world's largest contributors of greenhouse gas emissions?
<br>
<br>Scientists are searching for answers to that question, as they study how
<br>much methane is emitted into the atmosphere from man-made reservoirs
<br>built for hydropower and other purposes. Until recently, it was believed
<br>that about 20 percent of all man-made methane emissions come from the
<br>surface of reservoirs.
<br>
<br>New research suggests that figure may be much higher than 20 percent,
<br>but it's unclear how much higher because too little data is available to
<br>estimate. Methane is about 35 times as potent a greenhouse gas as carbon
<br>dioxide over the span of a century.
<br>
<br>Think about man-made lakes in terms of cows passing gas: Harsha Lake, a
<br>large reservoir near Cincinnati, Ohio, emitted as much methane in 2012
<br>as roughly 5,800 dairy cows would have emitted over an entire year,
<br>University of Cincinnati biogeochemist Amy Townsend-Small told Climate
<br>Central.
<br>
<br>Methane emissions from livestock are the second-largest source of
<br>methane emissions in the U.S., behind crude oil and natural gas,
<br>according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. But the EPA's
<br>greenhouse gas emissions estimates do not yet account for methane
<br>emissions coming from man-made reservoirs.
<br>
<br>Part of the reason is that, generally, very little is known about
<br>reservoirs and their emissions, especially in temperate regions, such as
<br>in the U.S., where few studies have been conducted.
<br>Hot News: 2014 On Track To Become Warmest Year
<br>
<br>In 2012 study, researchers in Singapore found that greenhouse gas
<br>emissions from hydropower reservoirs globally are likely greater than
<br>previously estimated, warning that "rapid hydropower development and
<br>increasing carbon emissions from hydroelectric reservoirs to the
<br>atmosphere should not be downplayed."
<br>
<br>Those researchers suggest all large reservoirs globally could emit up to
<br>104 teragrams of methane annually. By comparison, NASA estimates that
<br>global methane emissions associated with burning fossil fuels totals
<br>between 80 and 120 teragrams annually.
<br>
<br>But how much reservoirs contribute to global greenhouse gas emissions is
<br>"still a big question mark," because the issue remains relatively
<br>unstudied and emission rates are highly uncertain, said John Harrison,
<br>an associate professor in the School of the Environment at the
<br>Washington State University-Vancouver whose research focuses on how
<br>reservoirs can be managed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
<br>
<br>"So I don't think we really know what the relative greenhouse gas effect
<br>of reservoirs is compared to other sources of energy in the U.S.," he said.
<br>
<br>Research at Harsha Lake may help scientists better understand how
<br>reservoirs contribute to climate change.
<br>
<br>In a study published in August, Townsend-Small and researchers from the
<br>EPA found that Harsha Lake emitted more methane into the atmosphere in
<br>2012 than had ever been recorded at any other reservoir in the U.S.
<br>
<br>"When you compare the annual scale of the methane emission rate of this
<br>reservoir (Harsha Lake) to other studies, it's really much higher than
<br>people would predict," EPA research associate and Harsha Lake study lead
<br>author Jake Beaulieu told Climate Central.
<br>
<br>Scientists have long thought reservoirs in warmer climates in the
<br>tropics emitted more methane than reservoirs in cooler climates, but the
<br>research at Harsha Lake shows that may not be the case, Townsend-Small said.
<br>
<br>"We think this is because our reservoir is located in an agricultural
<br>area," she said.
<br>
<br>Methane is generated in reservoirs from bacteria living in
<br>oxygen-starved environments.
<br>
<br>"These microbes eat organic carbon from plants for energy, just like
<br>people and other animals, but instead of breathing out carbon dioxide,
<br>they breathe out methane," Townsend-Small said. "These same types of
<br>microbes live in the stomachs of cows and in landfills, which are other
<br>sources of methane to the atmosphere."
<br>
<br>Runoff from farmland around Harsha Lake provides more nutrients in the
<br>water, allowing algae to grow, just like numerous other reservoirs
<br>surrounded by agricultural land across the country.
<br>
<br>Methane-generating microbes feed on decaying algae, which means that
<br>lakes catching a lot of nutrient-rich agricultural runoff generate a lot
<br>of methane.
<br>
<br>"There are a very large number of these reservoirs in highly
<br>agricultural areas around the U.S.," Townsend-Small said. "It could be
<br>that these agricultural reservoirs are a larger source of atmospheric
<br>methane than we had thought in the past."
<br>
<br>Emissions from reservoirs in all climates could be underestimated
<br>because of a discovery Beaulieu's team found at Harsha Lake: The area
<br>where a river enters a man-made lake emits more methane than the rest of
<br>the lake overall.
<br>
<br>Nobody has measured that before, Beaulieu said.
<br>
<br>Most other research studying reservoir methane emissions doesn't account
<br>for how emissions may vary across the surface of a lake, he said.
<br>
<br>The EPA is about to begin a more comprehensive study measuring methane
<br>emissions from 25 reservoirs in a region stretching from northern
<br>Indiana to northern Georgia, with sampling beginning next year, Beaulieu
<br>said.
<br>
<br>That study will help the EPA eventually include reservoir methane
<br>emissions in its total estimates of human-caused methane emissions.
<br>
<br>Until that and other studies are complete, scientists can only speculate
<br>on the impact hydropower is having on the climate.
<br>
<br>"We're still in the very early days here of understanding how these
<br>systems work with respect to greenhouse gas production," Harrison said.
<br>
<br>This article originally appeared on Climate Central, all rights reserved.
<br>________________________________________________
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<br>To be removed from the list, please visit:
<br><a href="http://org.salsalabs.com/o/2486/unsubscribe.jsp">http://org.salsalabs.com/o/2486/unsubscribe.jsp</a>Weiqi Zhanghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16657414981487705201noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5039910341338893506.post-89146629613535398412014-10-03T15:43:00.000-07:002014-10-03T15:44:25.452-07:00Curb vast water use in central Asia/Nature magazine<a href="http://www.nature.com/news/resources-curb-vast-water-use-in-central-asia-1.16017">http://www.nature.com/news/resources-curb-vast-water-use-in-central-asia-1.16017</a><div><br></div><div><div>Resources: Curb vast water use in central Asia</div><div>by Olli Varis</div><div>01 October 2014</div><div><br></div><div>Irrigation-intensive industries in former Soviet republics have sucked water bodies dry. Olli Varis calls for economic reform to ease environmental and social tensions.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>A boat rusts on the bed of the dried Aral Sea, more than 90% of which has vanished in the past 50 years.</div><div>Shipwrecks rusting in the desert have come to symbolize the environmental havoc that has befallen the Aral Sea, which straddles Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. More than 90% of what was once the fourth-largest lake in the world has vanished in half a century1, 2, 3. The cracked shores are symptoms of the dramatic overuse of water in central Asia. Since the 1960s, 70% of Turkmenistan has become desert, and half of Uzbekistan's soil has become salty owing to dust blown from the dry bed of the Aral Sea1.</div><div><br></div><div>The republics of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan were developed as farming states to supply produce to the former Soviet Union1. Today, they are among the highest per capita users of water in the world — on average, each Turkmen consumes 4 times more water than a US citizen, and 13 times more than a Chinese one4 (see 'Top 20 consumers'). More than 90% of the region's water use is irrigating thirsty crops including cotton and wheat1, 2.</div><div><br></div><div>Decades of over-extraction have nearly sucked dry the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers that feed the Aral Sea. Local livelihoods that rely on livestock grazing, hunting and fishing have disappeared; ecosystems in the Aral's brackish waters, deltas, coasts, steppes and fertile river valleys have collapsed1. As water bodies have vanished, the local climate has become harsher: summers bring extreme heat and violent, salty dust storms; winters are more severely cold. The wind spreads salt and agrochemicals to farmlands hundreds of kilometres away, causing respiratory and gastroenterological diseases as well as anaemia, cancer and tuberculosis3, 5.</div><div><br></div><div>Struggling to shake off the Soviet legacy of environmental and political crises and oligarchies, these republics are more rivals than neighbours. Because most of the region's water bodies — mainly the Syr Darya, Amu Darya and Zarafshon rivers — are shared, political tensions have grown around water access, drawing worrying parallels with similar crises in the Arab world.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>The first step is to recognize that the origin of central Asia's water problems is in excessive water demand. Fixing the problem will mean developing regional industries that are less water intensive and more profitable than agriculture, by tapping human potential rather than natural resources. Unless the region's economy can be put on a more sustainable footing, the stability and security of central Asia is in danger.</div><div><br></div><div>Shortage myth</div><div>Two fallacies stymie debate about water in central Asia. The first is that the region is short of water. The landscape looks dry and rivers run empty. Many analyses in the past few years3, 5 have thus recommended water-conservation measures, assuming that incremental policy changes are all that can be delivered. In fact, these countries have plenty of water relative to their populations. The annual availabilities of fresh water per capita for the Amu Darya (2,087 cubic metres) and the Syr Darya (1,744 m3) river basins6 are well above the United Nations definitions of water shortages7: 1,000 m3 per capita constitutes a chronic shortage, and 1,700 m3 a moderate shortage. By comparison, Denmark has 1,128 m3 of water per capita, Germany 1,878 m3 and the United Kingdom 2,465 m3(ref. 4).</div><div><br></div><div>The second fallacy is that the solution is agricultural. Most analysts propose that water should be used more efficiently on farms because it is wasted in growing low-return crops on dry lands unsuitable for agricultural use. Turkmenistan's dry climate and poor soils mean that producing a tonne of wheat takes 2,000–4,000 m3 of irrigation water, whereas in nearby northern Kazakhstan adequate rainfall and conditions mean that no irrigation is needed. Even as its land became parched, Turkmenistan's wheat yield increased ninefold between 1992 and 2007.</div><div><br></div><div>But the big fish swims elsewhere: the agricultural share of gross domestic product (GDP) in central Asia has almost halved since the disintegration of the Soviet Union4. Instead, economic growth is dominated by the oil and gas industry and by urban expansion. Already, more than half of the region's population is urban and that proportion is rising.</div><div><br></div><div>Despite this, central Asian economies continue to focus on primary industries such as agriculture and the extraction of fossil fuels. The economic return on water is lower in central Asia than anywhere else on the planet. Turkmenistan uses nearly 3 times more water than India to produce one GDP dollar, 4 times more than Egypt, 14 times more than China and 43 times more than Spain4.</div><div><br></div><div>Rising tension</div><div>The resulting problems are greater than just stagnant economies. Disputes (see 'Troubled waters') between nations have arisen around access to shared water bodies in the Fergana Valley in the Syr Darya river basin, in the Zarafshon river basin, and in Amu Darya — most notably concerning the Nurek dam and Turkmen–Uzbek rivalries on water appropriation.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Expand</div><div>These tensions are stoked by absurd projects such as the Golden Age Lake (Altyn Asyr) in the Karakum Desert8, 9. Projected to cover almost half the area of the Great Salt Lake in Utah, the synthetic lake will be about six times its volume. Since 2000, Turkmenistan has been constructing it, claiming it will increase agricultural production and offer a "symbol of revival of the Turkmen land", as former president Saparmurat Niyazov (known as Turkmenbashi) put it9.</div><div><br></div><div>Water for the lake will be drawn from the Amu Darya river through two canals, which are being cut across about 3,200 km of desert8, 9. Although it is unclear whether that much water can ever be sourced from the river, it is obvious that downstream, Uzbekistan will not accept those diversions and is ready to defend its water share with arms if necessary. The already serious soil-salinization problems of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan will be greatly worsened if the project is completed.</div><div><br></div><div>Related stories</div><div>Public health: A sustainable plan for China's drinking water</div><div>Agriculture: Steps to sustainable livestock</div><div>Conservation: Nicaragua Canal could wreak environmental ruin</div><div>More related stories</div><div>Like most other parts of the former Soviet Union, central Asian states suffer authoritarian rule and political fragility. Soaring unemployment is leading to a mass emigration of educated people. Current figures estimate that up to one-third of working-age Tajiks are employed abroad. Ethnic, political and religious diversity and difficulties with boundary demarcation fuel nationalism. Internal hostilities, as in the Caucasus, Moldova and eastern Ukraine, are a threat. A full-scale regional conflict, regardless of the rise of radical religious groups, is not out of the question.</div><div><br></div><div>Central Asia's water crisis echoes that in the Middle East and North Africa, where political, economic and environmental issues are also intertwined. In Arab countries such as Syria, Yemen and Tunisia, water is scarce and used for low-value purposes, generating little income or investment10. Urban populations are fast-growing but ill-served by development policies focused on traditional rural and primary industries. Political and professional inertia makes change difficult.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Sergey Ponomarev/The New York Times/Redux/eyevine</div><div>Kazakhstan's capital Astana: rapid urban expansion will influence the region's water use.</div><div>Three main differences may make the situation in the former Soviet republics worse than in the Middle East. First, investments in the central Asian water sector are even less productive and more conflict-prone than in Arab countries. Second, water is more abundant in central Asia but environmental disasters have been more severe there than in Arab countries. Third, Arab cities absorb immigrants more successfully and grow faster than those in central Asia, where skilled workers tend to emigrate to countries outside the region, notably Russia.</div><div><br></div><div>The central Asian countries must find joint interests and competitive advantages to build a new regional economy, with wise water use at its heart. These countries could have a much more conscious role in world politics and in the global economy by looking at their complementary strengths and merging their markets.</div><div><br></div><div>Human potential</div><div>The human resources of central Asia are relatively untapped. The republics have essentially full adult literacy and well over 90% of adults have secondary education8. The nations are in a favourable geographical position between diverse markets, including China, Russia, the Middle East and Europe.</div><div><br></div><div>Different national strengths should be exploited: Turkmenistan is rich in oil, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan in hydropower, for instance. Urban economies, services, manufacturing and knowledge-intensive industries should be boosted by governance reforms.</div><div><br></div><div>Realizing human potential would require policies to attract investments, maintain and enhance high standards of education, help industries to grow, and empower a bigger share of the population to contribute to political decision-making. Inertia may be the real bottleneck.</div><div><br></div><div>Experience from elsewhere abounds. Information and communication technology brings in more than one-quarter of India's export earnings; China, South Korea, Vietnam and some other ex-Soviet states — notably Estonia — have also created knowledge-based industries almost from scratch. Such industries provide intellectually attractive, high-income jobs for the younger generation and put little strain on water resources and the environment.</div><div><br></div><div>International policy-makers and the water sector must refocus and look much more broadly at water's role in the region's political and economic development. That wider perspective should guide the next round of water-resources assessments, as well as top-level international policy meetings such as the 7th World Water Forum in Daegu, South Korea, in April 2015.</div><div><br></div><div>The alternative could be much worse: more iron wreckage on the drylands — this time of military origin.</div><div><br></div><div>Nature 514, 27–29 (02 October 2014) doi:10.1038/514027a</div><div><br></div><div>References available online</div></div>Weiqi Zhanghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16657414981487705201noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5039910341338893506.post-55702129050780474582014-09-24T16:55:00.000-07:002014-09-24T16:56:16.450-07:00Is Hydropower Really Green?Is Renewable Energy Really Green?
<br>Guest post written by Kamala Vainy Pillai PhD
<br>Forbes Opinion,
<br>September 24, 2014
<br><a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2014/09/24/is-renewable-energy-really-green/">www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2014/09/24/is-renewable-energy-really-green/</a>
<br>
<br>The global green rush to move away from fossil fuel dependence has
<br>incontestably led to a plethora of renewable energy initiatives – some
<br>sounding sexier and more appealing than others. From the traditional
<br>renewable energy like hydropower, wind, solar and biofuel, today's
<br>alternative renewable energies using disruptive technologies promises
<br>innumerable avenues for a host of communities and nations. Anaerobic
<br>digestion energy, biomass, geothermal, ocean energy such as ocean
<br>thermal, tidal or wave energy, solar thermal and tower power
<br>technologies are already joining the bandwagon of emerging stars. Yet,
<br>are Renewables really green?
<br>
<br>The concept of renewable energy generally denotes clean energy systems
<br>that do not contribute to greenhouse gas emission (GHE) and climate
<br>change. As renewables get into top gear, growing evidence of
<br>non-inclusion of social conscience in the name of renewable energy
<br>development as well as severe environmental damage is unmasking the dark
<br>side of renewables.
<br>
<br>In this article, we will look at hydropower. The global hydropower
<br>market according to investment analysts is predicted to expand over the
<br>next few years as a less risky and more popular clean energy. While the
<br>predictions sound promising, controversies over mega hydropower dam
<br>projects and its socio-environmental sustainability issues present
<br>confounding facts. Mega hydro dams have been successful in Canada, the
<br>United States and other industrialized nations; however, the same cannot
<br>be said for the tropical regions. Deforestation and the flooding
<br>(inundation) of thousands of hectares of rainforest for mega hydro dam
<br>projects in the Amazon and Borneo, which represents the planet's largest
<br>and oldest rainforests have received intense criticisms. According to
<br>World Wildlife Fund (WWF), tropical rainforests which serve as our
<br>planet's carbon sink, holds more than 210 gigatonnes of carbon.
<br>Deforestation is responsible for more than 15% of greenhouse gas
<br>emissions (GHG) – more than any other human activity put together, has a
<br>potent impact on accelerating global warming. In the case of mega hydro
<br>dams, the inundation (flooding) of tropical rainforest has triggered a
<br>cataclysm. The slow decay of rich organic rainforest matter flooded in
<br>the mega dam is expected to take centuries – consuming more oxygen at
<br>any given time, inconvertibly leading to oxygen-deprivation and high
<br>acidity of waters. This state has resulted in poor quality of drinking
<br>water as well as for household use to communities downstream. Further,
<br>due to the alterations of the composition and density of vectors,
<br>incidences of public health problems are on the rise and even death or
<br>extinction of animal and plant life as far as 100 km from the mega dam
<br>site have been reported. In 2013, National Geographic expounded on the
<br>extinction of endangered migratory fish in the upstream of mega dams in
<br>most South American countries like Colombia, Brazil and Paraguay.
<br>Similarly, in Asia, the rare Asian river dolphins like the Indus
<br>dolphins and Irrawaddy dolphins have become endangered by the
<br>alterations of rivers for mega dams. Late August this year,
<br>International Rivers launched "The State of the World's Rivers" the
<br>first-of-its-kind interactive online database to illustrate the impacts
<br>on the health of the world's river basins as a result of the mega dams.
<br>
<br>Continued displacement of the planet's oldest and largest indigenous
<br>communities in the rainforest region of the Amazon and Borneo has drawn
<br>global attention and civil society accessions. With growing legal
<br>disputes over indigenous land encroachments, mega dam hydro projects in
<br>these regions have become controversial as well as complicated for clean
<br>energy investors. The Belo Monte Dam, for instance, expected to be one
<br>of the largest after the Three Gorges Dam in China and the
<br>Brazilian-Paraguayan Itaipu Dam, continues to be legally disputed by the
<br>Kayapos and indigenous communities who have been living there for
<br>centuries. Displaced indigenous communities like the Penans, as a
<br>result of the mega Bakun Hydro Dam in Borneo, are reported to be
<br>experiencing emotional traumas as a result of the dispossession of their
<br>lands and displacement from their centuries-old nomadic way of life.
<br>Remote communities around these sites are reported to be still without
<br>electricity, as the grids built mainly serve smelters and industrial
<br>operations in the area.
<br>
<br>One of the factors cited for this state of affair is the inefficient and
<br>inequitable social and environmental impact assessment (SEIA) conducted
<br>prior to these projects. It appears that the SEIA reports have endorsed
<br>massive relocation of indigenous communities and offered limited or no
<br>consideration of the irreversible impact on wildlife and ecosystems
<br>downstream from the mega renewable energy sites. In 2012, in its
<br>sourcebook for "Getting to Green" guideline, the World Bank reiterated
<br>that too many environmental impact assessments (EIAs) are being
<br>conducted by poorly trained EIA practitioners with limited capacity and
<br>environmental information, leading to poor-quality reports.
<br>
<br>Although international development funding agencies, energy companies
<br>and governments have hit a hard wall due to stalled or underperforming
<br>mega renewable projects, they assert that the above competing
<br>perspectives would change over time with increased social and economic
<br>benefits. An Oxford study published this year, present a confounding
<br>verdict. The study which scientifically analyzed the economics of mega
<br>dams from 1934 to 2007, included 245 projects in 65 countries, confirmed
<br>that mega dams suffered cost overruns of 96 per cent. The Oxford
<br>researches affirmed that even without social and environmental cost
<br>consideration, the mega dams did not make economic sense. The
<br>staggering findings are expected to have a significant implication on
<br>the future of energy sector planning.
<br>
<br>The deliberation propounds three pertinent points for renewable energy
<br>proponents – firstly, large scale renewable energy projects may not be
<br>as 'green and clean' as prophesied; secondly, with rising pluralism and
<br>conscious green consumers, renewable energy projects would be subject to
<br>greater scrutiny for societal and environmental impacts and hence,
<br>should demonstrate greater social-environmental accountability; and
<br>finally, the compelling findings on the mega hydro dams being uneconomic
<br>with cost overruns which are too high to yield a positive return,
<br>presents a new debate for the renewable energy outlook.
<br>________________________________________________
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<br>Opinion piece by Rudo Sanyanga
<br>Business Day (South Africa), September 4, 2014
<br><a href="http://www.bdlive.co.za/opinion/2014/09/04/dams-will-not-solve-all-africas-energy-problems">www.bdlive.co.za/opinion/2014/09/04/dams-will-not-solve-all-africas-energy-problems</a>
<br>
<br>[This commentary also appeared in Swedish by Svenska Dagbladet on
<br>September 3, 2014, at
<br><a href="http://www.svd.se/opinion/brannpunkt/fel-att-ge-pris-for-gardagens-teknik_3876786.svd">www.svd.se/opinion/brannpunkt/fel-att-ge-pris-for-gardagens-teknik_3876786.svd</a>.]
<br>
<br>THE world's water experts convene in Stockholm on Thursday where King
<br>Carl Gustav will present the city's Water Prize to John Briscoe, a
<br>Harvard professor and former water manager at the World Bank. After many
<br>years spent in the international water bureaucracy, Briscoe says he is
<br>"controversial and proud of it". Indeed, the jury's choice raises
<br>contentious questions about how best to manage water resources for the
<br>shared benefit of all.
<br>
<br>Since the turn of the century, John Briscoe has been the world's
<br>pre-eminent crusader for large dams in Africa and other continents. In
<br>the 20th century, Europe developed approximately 80 percent of its
<br>hydropower potential, while Africa has still only exploited 8 percent of
<br>its own. It would be hypocritical, Briscoe contends, to withhold funds
<br>for more dam building in Africa now.
<br>
<br>Africa has tried to follow Europe's path to industrial development
<br>before. With funding and advice from the World Bank and other
<br>institutions, newly independent governments built large dams that were
<br>supposed to industrialise and modernise their countries in the 1960s and
<br>1970s. The Kariba Dam on the Zambezi, the Akosombo Dam on the Volta and
<br>the Inga 1 and 2 dams on the Congo River are the most prominent examples
<br>of this approach.
<br>
<br>Mega-dams have not turned out to be a silver bullet, but a big albatross
<br>on Africa's development. Their costs spiraled out of control creating
<br>massive debt burdens, while their performance did not live up to the
<br>expectations. Their benefits were concentrated on mining companies and
<br>urban middle classes, while the rural population has been left high and
<br>dry. Africa has become the world region that is most dependent on
<br>hydropower. As rainfalls are becoming ever less reliable, this has made
<br>the continent highly vulnerable to climate change.
<br>
<br>In 2008, mining companies consumed more electricity than the whole
<br>population in Sub-Saharan Africa. After tens of billions of dollars in
<br>foreign aid have been spent on energy projects, 69 percent of the
<br>continent's population continues to live in the dark. Prioritising the
<br>needs of mining companies and big cities over the rural populations, the
<br>World Bank's latest dam projects in Africa will further entrench this
<br>energy apartheid.
<br>
<br>Meanwhile, the communities which were displaced by the Kariba and Inga
<br>dams continue to struggle for just compensation decades after the
<br>projects were built. Because poor people pay the price but don't reap
<br>the benefits of these investments, the independent World Commission on
<br>Dams has found that dams "can effectively take a resource from one group
<br>and allocate it to another". The Tonga people, who were displaced by the
<br>Kariba Dam and suffered starvation as a consequence, have to this date
<br>remained without clean water or electricity despite the huge reservoir
<br>at their doorsteps.
<br>
<br>Luckily solutions that don't sacrifice one group of people for the
<br>benefits of another are available today. Wind, solar and geothermal
<br>energy have become competitive with hydropower. Unlike large dams, these
<br>energy sources don't depend on centralised electric grids, but can serve
<br>the needs of the rural populations wherever they live. This is why the
<br>International Energy Agency recommends that the bulk of foreign energy
<br>aid be devoted to decentralised renewable energy sources if the goal of
<br>sustainable energy for all by 2030 is to be met. A diverse,
<br>decentralised portfolio of renewable energy projects will also make
<br>African countries more resilient to climate change than putting all eggs
<br>into the basket of a few mega-dams.
<br>
<br>Just because Europe developed with large dams in the 20th century
<br>doesn't mean Africa has to do the same today. In the telecom sector,
<br>Africa has successfully leapfrogged Europe's landline model and relied
<br>on cell phone companies to provide access to the majority of the
<br>population. Like cell phone towers, wind, solar and micro-hydropower
<br>projects can be built quickly, close to where people need them, and
<br>without major environmental impacts.
<br>
<br>Large dams may still make sense in specific situations, but Africa's
<br>future is lit by the sun. We appreciate that John Briscoe has
<br>reinvigorated an important debate about large dams. But we hope that in
<br>the coming years, the Stockholm Water Prize will celebrate the solutions
<br>of the future rather than the past.
<br>
<br>A native of Zimbabwe, Rudo Sanyanga holds a Ph.D. in Aquatic Systems
<br>Ecology from Stockholm University. She is the Africa Program Director of
<br>International Rivers and is based in Pretoria.
<br>________________________________________________
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<br>Opinion - Jacques Leslie
<br>The New York Times, August 22, 2014
<br><a href="http://nyti.ms/1poPZdC">nyti.ms/1poPZdC</a>
<br>
<br>THAYER SCUDDER, the world's leading authority on the impact of dams on
<br>poor people, has changed his mind about dams.
<br>
<br>A frequent consultant on large dam projects, Mr. Scudder held out hope
<br>through most of his 58-year career that the poverty relief delivered by
<br>a properly constructed and managed dam would outweigh the social and
<br>environmental damage it caused. Now, at age 84, he has concluded that
<br>large dams not only aren't worth their cost, but that many currently
<br>under construction "will have disastrous environmental and
<br>socio-economic consequences," as he wrote in a recent email.
<br>
<br>Mr. Scudder, an emeritus anthropology professor at the California
<br>Institute of Technology, describes his disillusionment with dams as
<br>gradual. He was a dam proponent when he began his first research project
<br>in 1956, documenting the impact of forced resettlement on 57,000 Tonga
<br>people in the Gwembe Valley of present-day Zambia and Zimbabwe.
<br>Construction of the Kariba Dam, which relied on what was then the
<br>largest loan in the World Bank's history, required the Tonga to move
<br>from their ancestral homes along the Zambezi River to infertile land
<br>downstream. Mr. Scudder has been tracking their disintegration ever since.
<br>
<br>Once cohesive and self-sufficient, the Tonga are troubled by
<br>intermittent hunger, rampant alcoholism and astronomical unemployment.
<br>Desperate for income, some have resorted to illegal drug cultivation and
<br>smuggling, elephant poaching, pimping and prostitution. Villagers still
<br>lack electricity.
<br>
<br>Mr. Scudder's most recent stint as a consultant, on the Nam Theun 2 Dam
<br>in Laos, delivered his final disappointment. He and two fellow advisers
<br>supported the project because it required the dam's funders to carry out
<br>programs that would leave people displaced by the dam in better shape
<br>than before the project started. But the dam was finished in 2010, and
<br>the programs' goals remain unmet. Meanwhile, the dam's three owners are
<br>considering turning over all responsibilities to the Laotian government
<br>- "too soon," Mr. Scudder said in an interview. "The government wants to
<br>build 60 dams over the next 20 or 30 years, and at the moment it doesn't
<br>have the capacity to deal with environmental and social impacts for any
<br>single one of them."
<br>
<br>"Nam Theun 2 confirmed my longstanding suspicion that the task of
<br>building a large dam is just too complex and too damaging to priceless
<br>natural resources," he said. He now thinks his most significant
<br>accomplishment was not improving a dam, but stopping one: He led a 1992
<br>study that helped prevent construction of a dam that would have harmed
<br>Botswana's Okavango Delta, one of the world's last great wetlands.
<br>
<br>Part of what moved Mr. Scudder to go public with his revised assessment
<br>was the corroboration he found in a stunning Oxford University study
<br>published in March in Energy Policy. The study, by Atif Ansar, Bent
<br>Flyvbjerg, Alexander Budzier and Daniel Lunn, draws upon cost statistics
<br>for 245 large dams built between 1934 and 2007. Without even taking into
<br>account social and environmental impacts, which are almost invariably
<br>negative and frequently vast, the study finds that "the actual
<br>construction costs of large dams are too high to yield a positive return."
<br>
<br>The study's authors - three management scholars and a statistician - say
<br>planners are systematically biased toward excessive optimism, which dam
<br>promoters exploit with deception or blatant corruption. The study finds
<br>that actual dam expenses on average were nearly double pre-building
<br>estimates, and several times greater than overruns of other kinds of
<br>infrastructure construction, including roads, railroads, bridges and
<br>tunnels. On average, dam construction took 8.6 years, 44 percent longer
<br>than predicted - so much time, the authors say, that large dams are
<br>"ineffective in resolving urgent energy crises."
<br>
<br>DAMS typically consume large chunks of developing countries' financial
<br>resources, as dam planners underestimate the impact of inflation and
<br>currency depreciation. Many of the funds that support large dams arrive
<br>as loans to the host countries, and must eventually be paid off in hard
<br>currency. But most dam revenue comes from electricity sales in local
<br>currencies. When local currencies fall against the dollar, as often
<br>happens, the burden of those loans grows.
<br>
<br>One reason this dynamic has been overlooked is that earlier studies
<br>evaluated dams' economic performance by considering whether
<br>international lenders like the World Bank recovered their loans - and in
<br>most cases, they did. But the economic impact on host countries was
<br>often debilitating. Dam projects are so huge that beginning in the
<br>1980s, dam overruns became major components of debt crises in Turkey,
<br>Brazil, Mexico and the former Yugoslavia. "For many countries, the
<br>national economy is so fragile that the debt from just one mega-dam can
<br>completely negatively affect the national economy," Mr. Flyvbjerg, the
<br>study's lead investigator, told me.
<br>
<br>To underline its point, the study singles out the massive Diamer-Bhasha
<br>Dam, now under construction in Pakistan across the Indus River. It is
<br>projected to cost $12.7 billion (in 2008 dollars) and finish
<br>construction by 2021. But the study suggests that it won't be completed
<br>until 2027, by which time it could cost $35 billion (again, in 2008
<br>dollars) - a quarter of Pakistan's gross domestic product that year.
<br>
<br>Using the study's criteria, most of the world's planned mega-dams would
<br>be deemed cost-ineffective. That's unquestionably true of the gargantuan
<br>Inga complex of eight dams intended to span the Congo River - its first
<br>two projects have produced huge cost overruns - and Brazil's purported
<br>$14 billion Belo Monte Dam, which will replace a swath of Amazonian rain
<br>forest with the world's third-largest hydroelectric dam.
<br>
<br>Instead of building enormous, one-of-a-kind edifices like large dams,
<br>the study's authors recommend "agile energy alternatives" like wind,
<br>solar and mini-hydropower facilities. "We're stuck in a 1950s mode where
<br>everything was done in a very bespoke, manual way," Mr. Ansar said over
<br>the phone. "We need things that are more easily standardized, things
<br>that fit inside a container and can be easily transported."
<br>
<br>All this runs directly contrary to the current international
<br>dam-building boom. Chinese, Brazilian and Indian construction companies
<br>are building hundreds of dams around the world, and the World Bank
<br>announced a year ago that it was reviving a moribund strategy to fund
<br>mega-dams. The biggest ones look so seductive, so dazzling, that it has
<br>taken us generations to notice: They're brute-force, Industrial Age
<br>artifacts that rarely deliver what they promise.
<br>
<br>Jacques Leslie is the author, most recently, of "Deep Water: The Epic
<br>Struggle Over Dams, Displaced People, and the Environment."
<br>________________________________________________
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<br>Million People
<br>ABC News, Aug 7, 2014
<br>By LEE FERRAN and MAZIN FAIQ, Investigative Reporter
<br><a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/mosul-dam-control-terrifying-dam-iraq-life-death/story?id=24878057">https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/mosul-dam-control-terrifying-dam-iraq-life-death/story?id=24878057</a>
<br>
<br>There are conflicting reports out today about whether the extremist
<br>group ISIS has taken control over Iraq's largest and most dangerous dam,
<br>which Iraqi officials had previously said was safe under the protection
<br>of Kurdish forces.
<br>
<br>ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, wrote on their website today
<br>that they are in control of the two-mile-wide Mosul Dam, echoing claims
<br>the group made over the weekend. Iraqi media reports and a Kurdish
<br>official have supported the claim. But late Wednesday and early today,
<br>two Iraqi government officials, one from the Ministry of Water Resources
<br>and the other familiar with the dam's operations, told ABC News ISIS had
<br>not taken the dam and said that it is functioning as usual.
<br>
<br>The question of control is a critical one for the millions of Iraqis who
<br>live downstream of the Mosul Dam all the way down the Tigris to Baghdad,
<br>because if the dam was taken over, ISIS would be in control of what
<br>could effectively be a major weapon of mass destruction – one that the
<br>U.S. military said in 2006 was, without the help of brutal jihadists,
<br>already "the most dangerous dam in the world."
<br>
<br>It wouldn't even have to be sabotaged to fail – if an extremist group
<br>took control and wanted the dam to break, they may be able to simply do
<br>nothing.
<br>
<br>The gargantuan dam, built in the mid-1980s, was constructed on "a
<br>foundation of soluble soils that are continuously dissolving, resulting
<br>in the formation of cavities and voids underground that place the dam at
<br>risk for failure," said an urgent letter sent from David Petraeus, then
<br>commanding general of the U.S. Army, and Ryan Crocker, then U.S.
<br>Ambassador to Iraq, to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in 2007.
<br>[The Mosul Dam was built by the German-Italian Hochtief consortium -
<br>International Rivers]
<br>
<br>The dam requires "extraordinary engineering measures" – namely constant
<br>grouting operations -- to fill in the holes and "maintain the structural
<br>integrity and operating capability of the dam," according to a U.S. Army
<br>Corps of Engineers (USACE) report from the same year.
<br>
<br>For 30 years –- and through several periods of violent conflict -- the
<br>Iraqi government has managed to keep the dam upright by continuously
<br>pumping in literally tons of grout like an industrial version of the
<br>little Dutch boy, as a geotechnical expert who worked on the dam put it.
<br>
<br>But the U.S. says any failure of the dam could be "catastrophic."
<br>
<br>"[T]he most severe impact of a dam failure would be [for] the City of
<br>Mosul, located 50 kilometers [31 miles] downstream of the dam,"
<br>Petraeus' and Crocker's 2007 letter says. "Assuming a worse [sic] case
<br>scenario, an instantaneous failure of Mosul Dam filled to its maximum
<br>operating level could result in a flood wave over 20 meters [65 feet]
<br>deep at the City of Mosul, which would result in a significant loss of
<br>life and property." Mosul alone is estimated to be home to more than 1.5
<br>million people. Flood waters, albeit at a lower level, could reach all
<br>the way to Baghdad, more than 200 miles further down the Tigris,
<br>depending on the performance of another smaller dam further downriver.
<br>
<br>A 2011 report written by a USACE official and published in Water Power
<br>magazine estimated failure "could lead to as many as 500,000 civilian
<br>deaths."
<br>
<br>The Water Power article states that Iraq is "fully aware of the
<br>challenges facing the ageing structure," but as USACE civil engineer
<br>David Paul told the magazine at the time, "there is no precedence for
<br>what they are trying to achieve" in finding a more permanent solution to
<br>the dam's problems than never-ending grouting – including the proposed
<br>use of an incredibly large "cutoff wall" to help mitigate the seepage.
<br>There are other measures that can be taken, such as keeping the
<br>reservoir levels lower than the maximum to reduce pressure on the dam;
<br>that was one of several recommendations the U.S. government made in 2007.
<br>
<br>But none totally fix the problem and the geotechnical expert who spoke
<br>to ABC News said that he didn't have reason to believe the dam is any
<br>better off today than it was when the USACE report was published in 2007.
<br>
<br>That was also before a powerful jihadist group borne of the Syrian civil
<br>war began its deadly march across Iraq and reportedly up to Mosul Dam's
<br>doorstep. Like today, earlier this week there were conflicting reports
<br>about whether ISIS had taken control of the dam during a previous
<br>24-hour offensive in the area.
<br>
<br>Tuesday the Iraqi Ministry of Water Resources circulated a statement
<br>saying the dam was not under ISIS control but has been protected by
<br>Kurdish peshmerga troops. The government department reiterated the claim
<br>earlier today.
<br>
<br>A second Iraqi official involved with the dam's operations said
<br>Wednesday that grouting supplies were safe and there was plenty in store.
<br>
<br>"Grouting is still ongoing and never stopped," said the official, who
<br>asked his name not be used because he was not authorized to speak to the
<br>media.
<br>
<br>But what if ISIS does eventually overtake the dam? Or what if it already
<br>has?
<br>
<br>State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki told reporters Monday that Mosul
<br>Dam "has been in the sights of [ISIS] since its offensive began in June
<br>to further threaten and terrorize the Iraqi people."
<br>
<br>In addition to flooding concerns, the dam is also a "key source" of
<br>power and water for the surrounding area – making it a vital piece of
<br>infrastructure either way, another State Department spokesperson told
<br>ABC News Wednesday. An American intelligence source agreed and said that
<br>ISIS's potential control over and exploitation of power and water is a
<br>focus of U.S. intelligence community.
<br>
<br>The Iraqi official involved in the dam's operations refused to respond
<br>to the dire hypothetical of ISIS control Wednesday, but a U.S.
<br>government official long-familiar with the dam said it's an unsettling
<br>idea made more so by a litany of unanswered questions. ISIS may not want
<br>the dam to fail, considering it controls territory that would be flooded
<br>and could leverage their control over the water and power source, but
<br>the U.S. official said it would still be up to the jihadist group to
<br>keep the grouting going.
<br>
<br>"If ISIS does indeed have or gain control of the dam, will they listen
<br>to the dam engineers who have been working there for decades and who
<br>understand the need for constant grouting? … And then this is the
<br>biggie: If they can't or don't want to grout, how long will the dam
<br>last?... And if it fails, will it be a catastrophic all-at-once failure
<br>or more of a slowly building uncontrolled release?" the official told
<br>ABC News. "The short answer is no one knows. This is all guesswork anyway."
<br>
<br>The official said that he is not aware of official U.S. calculations
<br>about how long the dam would last without grouting but says he
<br>understands it to be "on the order of weeks, not months." The
<br>geotechnical expert agreed that "weeks" was a skeptical, but entirely
<br>possible estimation.
<br>
<br>"The potential for a disaster can't be ruled by and should be of great
<br>concern to all parties involved," the U.S. official said.
<br>
<br>The U.S. State Department told ABC News late Wednesday the department is
<br>"monitoring the situation closely." Officials at the Pentagon did not
<br>immediately respond to questions about whether any contingency plans are
<br>in place in case ISIS does take over the dam.
<br>________________________________________________
<br>
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<br><a href="http://org.salsalabs.com/o/2486/unsubscribe.jsp">http://org.salsalabs.com/o/2486/unsubscribe.jsp</a>Weiqi Zhanghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16657414981487705201noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5039910341338893506.post-40771007073205287442014-07-25T11:15:00.001-07:002014-07-25T11:15:48.150-07:0010 things you should know about investment in renewable energy /The Guardian<div><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/investment-renewables-10-things-climate-change">http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/investment-renewables-10-things-climate-change</a></div><div><br></div><div>10 things you should know about investment in renewable energy</div><div><br></div><div>In a recent panel, experts shared their thoughts on how to increase investment in renewables amid falling prices, policy uncertainty and emerging tech</div><div>Share 893</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>1. Solar and wind are cheaper than you think!</div><div><br></div><div>Despite an investor assumption that renewables are expensive, "this stuff is really cheap", said Bloomberg New Energy Finance's Jenny Chase. There are plenty of places where solar and wind already make economic sense, provided investment conditions are right.</div><div><br></div><div>People will start buying solar panels for their houses - without the need for subsidies - because it makes financial sense, Chase said. Panels now sell for less than a quarter of their 2008 price. And they won't be restricted to rooftops: Solar and wind plants are increasingly feeding into the grid and fulfilling the energy needs of large local power users, such as factories, in India and Chile.</div><div><br></div><div>Bloomberg estimates that the world will have 600GW of photovoltaic solar worldwide by 2020 (an increase from about 150GW today) and 1,900GW by 2030; making up 5-7% of the global electricity mix. These positive predictions are based on the falling prices of renewables.</div><div><br></div><div>2. Policy uncertainty is the biggest obstacle to investment in renewables</div><div><br></div><div>Governments are failing to take up the challenge and lead the way on renewables. The energy debate has become too politicised, argued EY's Ben Warren, and a lack of cohesive and stable policy has undermined a "long-term view on investment in renewable energy". Among the problems are skewed tax relief, fossil fuel subsidies and retroactive changes to renewable incentives, which make them risky to investors, panelists said.</div><div><br></div><div>Politicians are also listening to the wrong people, said Bruce Davis of Abundance Generation. The increasingly vocal lobbying of those with vested interests in slowing the growth of renewables is being heard more than the majority of voters who are in favour.</div><div><br></div><div>3. Regulators are getting better, although they still have 'sharp teeth'</div><div><br></div><div>That said, panelists were positive about the role of regulators, at least in the UK. Davis, who runs crowdfunding organisation Abundance Generation, said he is constantly updating the Financial Conduct Authority about innovations and the benefits crowdfunding can bring to investors without compromising investor protections.</div><div><br></div><div>"There is a world of difference between the old [Financial Services Authority] and the new FCA approach," he said. "That is not to say they don't have sharp teeth, but they do make efforts to listen to evidence and form policy based on real experiences of platforms."</div><div><br></div><div>4. Germany, Denmark and South Africa are good role models on renewables</div><div><br></div><div>Germany and Denmark have made great strides on renewables - partly because they have a diverse and large ownership base, said Co-operative Energy's Paul Monaghan. Germany has over 800 renewable energy co-operatives and the government has made - and stuck to - strong incentives for renewables, while in Denmark, communities have the right to invest and profit from wind turbine programs, which creates a broad political base for policy support.</div><div><br></div><div>The South African government has also done well on getting the best prices. It held a competitive tender, asking a simple question: "who wants to sell us wind and solar power for the lowest prices?" It was a simple but effective strategy that was clearly aligned with the long-term goals of government and also creates sustainable jobs locally, Davis said.</div><div><br></div><div>5. Business is leading the way</div><div><br></div><div>Corporates and individuals are taking the lead and hoping that policy will eventually follow. Business interruption risk and price volatility mean that an increasing number of businesses are taking a strategic approach to energy procurement. "Direct procurement of renewable energy might just prove to be one way for the sector to reduce its dependence on government policy," Warren said.</div><div><br></div><div>Software company SAP's Will Ritzrau said of his company's policy: "we look at renewables as a long term approach to control our energy cost and thus margin impact."</div><div><br></div><div>6. We need a diversity of projects</div><div><br></div><div>Having as many models as possible, from small-scale initiatives to large-scale projects, will be the key to financing the necessary energy transition, Emma Howard Boyd said.</div><div><br></div><div>According to Davis, co-operatives are good models where there is a motivated community with the requisite time and expertise. But it's also important to have schemes that appeal to commercial developers and make them more open to community involvement.</div><div><br></div><div>7. The public are up for renewables</div><div><br></div><div>Poll after poll shows that people have bought into the idea of renewables, Monghan said; now we have to unlock the big institutional investors. Crowdfunding can provide an easy way for people to get involved in projects that have already been vetted and will offer reasonable returns. Plus, organisations such as Share Action and Divestment are helping people have control over where their money is invested.</div><div><br></div><div>8. Developing countries could spearhead innovation</div><div><br></div><div>We may well see the flow of innovation reverse, with developed markets being disrupted by companies from developing markets. Energy innovation using mobile technology is one clear example of where this could happen: "more people in India own mobile phones than they do toothbrushes", Ashden's Chhavi Sharma said.</div><div><br></div><div>Sharma pointed to innovations such as M-PESA, which have allowed the renewable energy sector to leapfrog in Africa. Enterprises such as Off.Grid:Electric are using a service-based model and selling pay-as-you-go solar that can be paid for daily using mobile money, akin to setting up a micro-utility.</div><div><br></div><div>9. Power of the internet</div><div><br></div><div>It's hard to imagine how crowdfunding would work in an internet-free world, Chase said. The "internet of things" and broadband availability will enable automated and smart energy consumption. Large amounts of information will be needed to make the energy markets work. Soon smart technology will control various appliances so your fridge will stop cooling if the power price spikes, and other devices can be switched on or off automatically according to need.</div><div><br></div><div>Social media - and the internet more generally - have the potential to accelerate the awareness and acceptance of new technology. New and viable ideas, especially if they benefit individuals, will survive and grow. However, growing into a conservative market too early is also risky and some big companies may be a little more cautious about adopting potentially too-radical innovation.</div><div><br></div><div>10. There's some way to go</div><div><br></div><div>There have been leaps and bounds in terms of innovation and affordability, which have helped renewables to become an attractive investment opportunity. But if we are to reach the kind of levels required for a genuine energy transition, there's much more to be done. Investors should continue to view opportunities realistically, but also remain open-minded enough to recognise - and tap - the great renewable opportunities that exist.</div><div><br></div><div>The finance hub is funded by EY. All content is editorially independent except for pieces labelled advertisement feature. Find out more here.</div><div><br></div><div>Join the community of sustainability professionals and experts. Become a GSB member to get more stories like this direct to your inbox</div>Weiqi Zhanghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16657414981487705201noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5039910341338893506.post-42476860019371799002014-07-08T11:35:00.000-07:002014-07-08T11:36:58.822-07:00Government Audit Finds Hydropower Aid Doesn't Benefit the PoorGovernment Audit Finds Hydropower Aid Doesn't Benefit the Poor
<br>By Peter Bosshard
<br>Huffington Post, July 8, 2014
<br><a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-bosshard/government-audit-finds-hy_b_5564340.html">www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-bosshard/government-audit-finds-hy_b_5564340.html</a>
<br>
<br>No other industrialized country relies on hydropower for its own power
<br>generation as much as Norway. Norwegian companies build hydropower dams
<br>around the world, including controversial projects like the Theun
<br>Hinboun Dam in Laos. Norwegian development aid actively supports the
<br>interests of the hydropower sector. Norway is also promoting hydropower
<br>in international organizations and diplomatic initiatives.
<br>
<br>Since the turn of the century, Norway has spent more than NOK 12 billion
<br>(approximately $1.5 billion) on development assistance for the energy
<br>sector. This aid consists of the following elements:
<br>
<br>. Almost half of the assistance supported investments in mid-sized
<br>hydropower projects in Chile, the Philippines and other countries
<br>through SN Power, a state-owned investment company. The projects in
<br>which SN Power has invested include Allain Duhangan in Northern India, a
<br>dam that was bitterly opposed by the local population.
<br>
<br>. Norwegian aid supports the planning and construction of transmission
<br>lines, including a project that would export power from the
<br>controversial dams in the rainforest of Sarawak to Indonesia.
<br>
<br>. Norway is strengthening the capacity of Southern governments to build
<br>hydropower projects, and funds feasibility studies for specific
<br>projects. Norway has for example entered a hydropower partnership with
<br>Ethiopia, and has funded studies for two large dams on the Blue Nile.
<br>Only last month, the Norwegian government canceled this cooperation due
<br>to the Ethiopian government's insistence on uneconomic mega-dams.
<br>
<br>. A small portion of Norway's clean energy aid supports the development
<br>of decentralized renewable wind and solar projects.
<br>
<br>While the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has failed to evaluate
<br>its energy assistance, the government's Auditor General Office carried
<br>out an in-depth assessment of the assistance and submitted the findings
<br>to parliament on June 25.
<br>
<br>The findings of the audit are highly critical. The Auditor General
<br>states: "Norwegian assistance to clean energy has not led to a
<br>noticeable increase in power generation and has contributed little to
<br>improving living conditions for the poor in those countries that have
<br>been prioritized for such support."
<br>
<br>More specifically, the audit finds that Norwegian energy assistance is
<br>"still primarily directed towards hydropower, although countries have
<br>ample opportunities to utilize solar and wind energy resources." This
<br>bias makes recipient countries "more vulnerable to failure in energy
<br>supply" than a more balanced approach would have done. The support for
<br>transmission lines has created energy access for over 100,000
<br>households, although "primarily the wealthiest households" have
<br>benefited from this. The various measures have not spurred private
<br>investment in the recipient countries, and their economic viability is weak.
<br>
<br>"A stunning 12.26 billion Norwegian kroners has had little effect on
<br>electricity production, poverty alleviation and business creation in the
<br>prioritized target countries," FIVAS, a Norwegian environmental
<br>organization and long-time partner of International Rivers, commented on
<br>the audit findings. "This confirms our view that too much Norwegian
<br>support has been tied up in hydropower."
<br>
<br>In his response to the audit, Norway's Foreign Minister agreed that the
<br>rapid advancement of solar, wind and biomass power "will make it
<br>possible to expand the breadth of investment in clean energy," and
<br>accepted the recommendation "to strengthen efforts to improve energy
<br>access in rural areas with small-scale renewable solutions." At the same
<br>time, the Foreign Minister argued that among all technologies, Norway
<br>was still best placed to extend aid for hydropower.
<br>
<br>The strong and unambiguous findings of the independent audit offer the
<br>government an opportunity to change course. A failure to do so in the
<br>interest of the country's hydropower industry would dent the high
<br>credibility of Norway's development assistance.
<br>
<br>Norway is a leading voice in the global dams debate and is often
<br>considered a model in development and energy finance. The new audit adds
<br>to the growing evidence that large hydropower projects are not effective
<br>at reducing poverty, and that better tools for achieving this goal
<br>exist. The World Bank, the Green Climate Fund (which receives strong
<br>support from Norway and will soon decide on its own energy priorities)
<br>and other institutions should take note.
<br>
<br>[An English translation of the audit report's main sections is available
<br>at
<br><a href="http://www.internationalrivers.org/files/attached-files/norway_oag_report_translation_fivas_0714.pdf">www.internationalrivers.org/files/attached-files/norway_oag_report_translation_fivas_0714.pdf</a>.]
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<br><a href="http://org.salsalabs.com/o/2486/unsubscribe.jsp">http://org.salsalabs.com/o/2486/unsubscribe.jsp</a>Weiqi Zhanghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16657414981487705201noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5039910341338893506.post-77375014319313066452014-06-26T16:24:00.000-07:002014-06-26T16:25:28.832-07:00As Violence Grips Iraq, Fears of Pre-Emptive Flooding AriseAs Violence Grips Iraq, Fears of Pre-Emptive Flooding Arise
<br>Dam operators warn that army's plan to open floodgates to thwart ISIS
<br>would create massive destruction to villages
<br>
<br>Andrea Germanos, staff writer
<br>Common Dreams, 6/26/2014
<br><a href="http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2014/06/26-7">www.commondreams.org/headline/2014/06/26-7</a>
<br>
<br>The possibility of potentially catastrophic flooding has emerged
<br>following reporting that either Iraqi military forces or Sunni militants
<br>would open the floodgates of a dam on the Euphrates River.
<br>
<br>Citing statements by Iraqi security officials made Wednesday, the New
<br>York Times reported that ISIS forces "were advancing on the Haditha
<br>Dam," located roughly 120 miles from Baghdad.
<br>
<br>The dam is the country's second largest and generates hydroelectric power.
<br>
<br>The Times does not cite a specific threat made by ISIS forces that they
<br>would open the floodgates, but notes that ISIS fighters in April seized
<br>the Falluja Dam and unleashed flooding.
<br>
<br>The Times reporting adds that Iraqi government forces were responding to
<br>the possibility by being prepared to open the dam's floodgates
<br>themselves. From the Times:
<br>
<br> "This will lead to the flooding of the town and villages and will
<br>harm you also," the [dam] employee said he told the [army] officers.
<br>
<br>Regardless of which side might open the floodgates, it is the civilian
<br>population who would suffer in such an event, Peter Bosshard, Policy
<br>Director of International Rivers, an organization that works to protect
<br>rivers and the rights of communities that depend on them, explained to
<br>Common Dreams.
<br>
<br>"Dams have been used as weapons of mass destruction through the ages,"
<br>Bosshard continued. "In the first recorded water war, the army of Umma,
<br>a Sumerian city state, drained irrigation canals against their enemies
<br>of Lagash in present-day Iraq, not far from Haditha Dam, 4,500 years
<br>ago. In the most infamous case, the nationalist army of Chian Kai Shek
<br>destroyed the dikes of the Yellow River in 1937 to slow the advancing
<br>Japanese army, thereby flooding hundreds of thousands of square
<br>kilometers of land and killing at least 800,000 of its own people," he
<br>added.
<br>
<br>Khalid Salman, head of the Haditha local council, told the Washington
<br>Post that ISIS would want take over the dam not to unleash flooding but
<br>to control the power plant powered by it, thus being able to provide a
<br>service to the local population.
<br>
<br>"Of course they want to control the dam, which is very important, not
<br>only for Anbar, but for all of Iraq," the Post quotes Salman as saying.
<br>
<br>Meanwhile, violence continues to erupt in the country. Reuters reports
<br>that on Thursday battles were "raging" in the city of Tikrit, where
<br>Iraqi forces are launching a counter-attack on Sunni militant forces.
<br>
<br>And on Wednesday, Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr rebuked gains made by
<br>ISIS, and said his supporters "will shake the ground under the feet of
<br>ignorance and extremism," Agence France-Presse reports.
<br>
<br>Iraq's Prime Minister Nour al-Maliki has told the BBC that he welcomed
<br>strikes against ISIS carried out by Syria, which hit within the Syrian
<br>side of the Iraq/Syira border. He said they were carried out without
<br>coordination, but added, "We actually welcome any Syrian strike against
<br>ISIS."
<br>
<br>Amidst the official comments by leaders and new gains in territory by
<br>ISIS, a humanitarian crisis continues to unfold, as over one million
<br>Iraqis - including half a million children - have been forced to flee
<br>their homes.
<br>
<br>"Yet again, another humanitarian crisis hits war-torn Iraq,
<br>disproportionately and negatively impacting the hungry poor," reads a
<br>statement issued Wednesday by United Nations World Food Programme
<br>Executive Director Ertharin Cousin.
<br>
<br>"The UN and the entire humanitarian community are surging staff,
<br>releasing funds and drawing on all available stocks to assist people
<br>affected by the fighting and meet the urgent growing needs," Cousin added.
<br>________________________________________________
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<br><a href="http://org.salsalabs.com/o/2486/unsubscribe.jsp">http://org.salsalabs.com/o/2486/unsubscribe.jsp</a>Weiqi Zhanghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16657414981487705201noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5039910341338893506.post-62539282708694439512014-06-18T13:48:00.000-07:002014-06-18T13:49:27.454-07:00Hydropower poses grid challenge for BrazilHydropower poses grid challenge for Brazil
<br>7 June 2014
<br>
<br>Brazil may be too reliant on hydropower as it builds world�s 3rd biggest dam, according to US Department of Energy
<br>
<br>By Gerard Wynn
<br>
<br>While rainfall has recently doused World Cup football pitches in southern and eastern Brazil, persistent drought elsewhere poses a challenge for the country�s hydropower, the US Department of Energy said on Tuesday.
<br>
<br>�Brazil is currently experiencing its worst drought in 40 years, which has contributed to electricity blackouts in many Brazilian regions,� the Energy Information Administration (EIA) said.
<br>
<br>�The south has been inundated with rainfall that has affected some World Cup matches, including those held in Natal, the site of team USA�s victory over Ghana last night,� it added.
<br>
<br>�(But) the drought has persisted in northern Brazil. Much of Brazil�s hydroelectric potential lies in the country�s Amazon River basin. This reliance on one resource for most of the country�s electricity generation, combined with the distant and disparate locations of its population centers, has presented electricity reliability challenges.�
<br>
<br>Hydropower is responsible for more than three quarters of Brazil�s electricity generation, making the present drought a topic of energy security.
<br>
<br>Brazil�s hydropower consumption fell 7% last year, according to data published by the energy company BP on Monday.
<br>
<br>Analysts expect that the country can cope with extra electricity demand during the World Cup, in the worst case limiting supply in regions not participating in the tournament, and stepping up gas-fired power.
<br>
<br>Hydropower consumption last year fell by 6.8 million tonnes of oil equivalent (MTOE), while natural gas consumption almost made up the difference, growing by 5.4 MTOE, according to the BP data.
<br>
<br>�Brazil has spent more than $5 billion to subsidize electric utilities replacing lost hydroelectric generation with fossil fuel-fired generation, including large amounts of liquefied natural gas, and has taken steps to provide backup generation for stadiums,� the EIA said.
<br>
<br>Notwithstanding the energy security risks, Brazil is in the process of building the world�s third biggest dam, on a tributary of the Amazon.
<br>
<br>The country already has the world�s second biggest dam, by generating capacity, shared with Paraguay on the Parana River in the south west of the country. At around 14,000 megawatts (MW), it is second only to the China Three Gorges� 22,500 MW.
<br>
<br>And it is expected to commission an equally enormous dam within two years.
<br>
<br>�The 14,000-megawatt Belo Monte dam along the Xingu River, expected to be completed in 2016, will become the second-largest dam in Brazil�and the third-largest dam in the world�at a projected cost of $13 billion,� the EIA said.
<br>
<br>- See more at: <a href="http://www.rtcc.org/2014/06/17/hydropower-poses-grid-challenge-for-brazil/#sthash.jVpHejH1.dpuf">http://www.rtcc.org/2014/06/17/hydropower-poses-grid-challenge-for-brazil/#sthash.jVpHejH1.dpuf</a>
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<br><a href="http://org.salsalabs.com/o/2486/unsubscribe.jsp">http://org.salsalabs.com/o/2486/unsubscribe.jsp</a>Weiqi Zhanghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16657414981487705201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5039910341338893506.post-2426127425161304052014-06-03T16:46:00.001-07:002014-06-03T16:46:48.243-07:00Should hydropower truly be described as renewable? (SciDevNet)<a href="http://www.scidev.net/global/water/editorials/hydropower-described-as-renewable.html">http://www.scidev.net/global/water/editorials/hydropower-described-as-renewable.html</a>
<br>
<br>
<br>Speed read
<br> � Hydroelectric dams provide carbon-free energy as well as a show of power
<br>
<br> � But they cause environmental harm and displace communities
<br>
<br> � Energy production should be labelled �renewable� if it serves local needs
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>A revival in huge hydro projects may cut carbon emissions, but proponents' use of the term 'renewable' is misplaced.
<br>
<br>Hydroelectric dams are the quintessential expression of human control of nature. As well as power, they create reservoirs of clean water, which to some are both pleasing to the eye and a place for tranquil recreation. They promise control of flooding, provide a steady supply of water for irrigation and, with time, a source of fresh fish.
<br>
<br>They are an economist's as well as an engineer's dream, and, coupled with dynamic images of the cranes, bulldozers and swarms of men in hard hats associated with their construction, they are an instant marketing opportunity for politicians eager to demonstrate their commitment to progress.
<br>
<br>Some argue that hydroelectric power has green credentials because it makes use of water - a free abundant and inherently benign medium.
<br>
<br>It takes advantage of gravity, transforming energy from flowing water into electricity in a process that is at once clean and carbon free. With growing global concerns over carbon emissions, it is no surprise that hydroelectric projects should have a certain allure for governments wrestling with their countries' energy needs.
<br>
<br>Yet this squeaky clean image has become tarnished over time, with criticism over the impact of these structures on the environment and the lives of people displaced by their construction.
<br>
<br>As large dams have come under ever-increasing scrutiny, so their popularity with governments has steadily declined over the past two decades.
<br>
<br>But this trend has recently been reversed. Massive hydroelectric projects are once again coming into vogue, with a boom in construction across the planet, from Brazil to China. Watching one of our audio slideshows on the Belo Monte Dam in Brazil cannot but elicit concern.
<br>
<br>The stark, if hauntingly beautiful, images of the Xingu rainforest, which is being destroyed in the wake of the controversial project, rekindle an uneasy awareness: that large-scale hydroelectric projects do not easily fit into the clean energy paradigm. So, should they enjoy the positive connotations of the word 'renewable'?
<br>
<br>How 'clean' is hydro?
<br>
<br>Part of this unease is rooted in a sense that the displacement of thousands of people and the logging of huge areas, the gouging out and crushing of rocks - in short, the systematic alteration of an ancient landscape with unpredictable final consequences - is not exactly 'clean', either environmentally or, indeed, morally.
<br>
<br>The other part of the unease reflects the uses to which the energy from large-scale hydro projects will be put.
<br>
<br>For some developing economies, there is an argument for exploring the careful and judicious use of hydropower to meet a particular region's energy needs, especially when these complement its water needs.
<br>
<br>Listen to Mallika Aryal's interview with Jeremy Bird, director-general of the International Water Management Institute, for a succinct account of why water management and energy production are so inextricably linked.
<br>
<br>Where energy production is borne out of necessity and serves local needs, I find the idea that hydropower can be described as 'renewable' reasonably acceptable, notwithstanding the controversies that always seem to surround such projects. There is more here than a simple question of semantics, or the technical meaning of words.
<br>
<br>The words we use also reflect a moral orientation. In my view, the crucial and central ingredient of the concept of 'renewable' should be a clear and overt recognition of this moral orientation, without any lingering taste of guilt.
<br>
<br>When hydropower energy generation moves from being a necessity that answers pressing energy needs to being a commodity to trade, and where it has a massive impact on the local ecosystem, questions need to be raised about whether it should enjoy the positive, feel-good connotations of the term 'renewable'.
<br>
<br>Relying on green credentials
<br>
<br>I have an uneasy feeling that there is a growing reliance in some quarters on the green credentials of hydroelectric power to support its development - where it is not being produced for local needs and where it has a massive impact on local ecosystems and human lives.
<br>
<br>Malaysia, for example - which last month hosted the ASEAN Renewable Energy Week - seems to have started to tap into the soothing qualities of the word 'renewable', most recently to assuage critics of a proposed dam on the Baram River in Sarawak on the island of Borneo.
<br>
<br>The Baram hydroelectric dam project is planned as part of the so-called Sarawak Corridor of Renewable Energy, which will involve building a cascade of dams along the river. But the electricity it is set to produce will not be for local use, but for export, including to neighbouring Brunei Darussalam.
<br>
<br>Critics of the dam also draw attention to the loss of biodiversity, forest and cultivated land that construction will cause.
<br>
<br>They suggest that 'mini-hydros' on smaller tributaries are a more acceptable alternative as they interfere less with the river ecosystem and generate power for local use rather than as a commodity for export.
<br>
<br>Large dams on mighty rivers such as the Xingu and the Baram profoundly alter ecosystems in ways which are unpredictable and potentially disastrous, as well as altering the lives and livelihoods of thousands of people.
<br>
<br>So what would a sustainable approach be to making use of such an ecosystem? The Baram and the Xingu already bathe and feed the areas surrounding them through natural river flow and will continue to do so as long as they are not choked midstream.
<br>
<br>Perhaps such rivers should simply be left in peace - and, in such contexts, perhaps we need to be more cautious in our use of the word 'renewable'.
<br>
<br>Editor, SciDev.Net
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<br><a href="http://org.salsalabs.com/o/2486/unsubscribe.jsp">http://org.salsalabs.com/o/2486/unsubscribe.jsp</a>Weiqi Zhanghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16657414981487705201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5039910341338893506.post-73313821132471773392014-05-06T09:57:00.000-07:002014-05-06T09:59:52.061-07:00Interview w/ WBank: "Responsible hydro is part of solution"/Water Power mag<div><a href="http://www.waterpowermagazine.com/features/featureresponsible-hydropower-is-part-of-the-solution-4255331/">http://www.waterpowermagazine.com/features/featureresponsible-hydropower-is-part-of-the-solution-4255331/</a></div><div><br></div><div>Responsible hydropower is part of the solution</div><div>1 May 2014</div><div> </div><div><br></div><div>Hydropower is now firmly back on the investment agenda for the World Bank and has a key role to play in tackling development challenges worldwide. Suzanne Pritchard spoke with the Bank's Chief Hydropower Specialist, Jean-Michel Devernay, to find out more.</div><div><br></div><div>Worldwide, 1.2 billion people lack access to electricity, 590 million of whom live in sub-Saharan Africa. In many countries, access is below 10%. But is responsible development of hydropower part of the solution?</div><div>"Sustainable hydropower is a critical part of a pathway to prosperity in Africa, as the largest source of renewable energy deployable at scale," says Jean-Michel Devernay, Chief Hydropower Specialist at the World Bank.</div><div>Devernay joined the World Bank Group in July 2012, and is currently the highest technical authority in the Bank regarding global issues related to hydropower development.</div><div>"Hydropower development comes with a complex set of economic, environmental, and social opportunities and risks," Devernay told IWP&DC.</div><div>"Assessing them with care is of the utmost importance to us and we believe that we can help developing countries manage the risks while generating long-term development benefits to meet development aspirations of millions of poor people in the developing world."</div><div>IWP&DC: What is the World Bank's current position on financing hydropower projects?</div><div><br></div><div>Jean-Michel Devernay: The World Bank Group (WBG) is firmly committed to the responsible development of hydropower.</div><div>This was approved unanimously by our Board as part of the World Bank Group's Energy Directions paper in July 2013. To provide concessional financing to our client countries for development of sustainable hydropower is one example of this commitment.</div><div>So would you say that hydropower is now firmly back on the investment programme for the World Bank?</div><div><br></div><div>J-M D: Yes. The President of the WBG, Jim Yong Kim, announced last year two corporate goals: to end poverty by 2030 and boost shared prosperity for the poorest 40% in a sustainable manner. We do not believe those goals can be achieved sustainably without hydropower. Uganda seven years ago was experiencing regular blackouts and had to use diesel-fired thermal power to backstop the energy gap. Today, with the Bujagali hydropower project up and running since 2012, this has drastically reduced blackouts and the need for costlier diesel-fired power. That creates a much better opportunity for homes, schools, clinics and businesses to thrive.</div><div>"Since the 2003 Water Resources Strategy...the World Bank has approved about 100 projects related to hydropower"</div><div>Since the 2003 Water Resources Strategy, which states that the Bank would re-engage in hydraulic infrastructure, the World Bank (includes IBRD/IDA, GEF and Recipient Executed Activities) has approved about 100 projects related to hydropower (during fiscal years 2003-13), for a total of US$5.7B in financing. It has 30 projects in its pipeline, roughly half of which are in Africa.</div><div>The IFC has approved 42 hydro projects totalling US$1.3B over the last decade.</div><div>Are you interested in financing in any region of the world, any type of project, even large dams? Is this as long as it is represents 'responsible development'?</div><div><br></div><div>J-M D:Our support is not linked to any specific region or any specific type or size of project. When asked by developing countries, the WBG provides support to hydro projects only when they have a demonstrated economic viability, and if they comply with the institution's internationally-recognised social and environmental safeguards and performance standards. Each project should be assessed on its own merits and developed if it can help alleviate poverty and boost shared prosperity.</div><div>There are viable run-of-river (RoR), storage and smaller projects possible. Our portfolio for recent years shows that we support hydropower projects of all scales, with projects above 100MW representing less than one-third of the total. A more detailed analysis shows more hydropower rehabilitation projects than greenfield projects, and a balanced mix of storage, RoR, and pumped-storage projects.</div><div>In fact, 45% of our hydropower interventions over the last 10 years were for off-grid mini and small hydropower. During this period, the WBG also facilitated 27 carbon market transactions around hydropower to offset emissions from other technologies. Of these, approximately 60% were for RoR projects.</div><div>How much money the Bank has pledged for funding hydropower projects in the world's poorest countries?</div><div><br></div><div>J-M D:The WBG has not pledged any specific amount of our support to hydropower. The level of funding we will commit to hydropower will depend on the needs of developing countries, and the types of projects for which they request our assistance, and is therefore likely to vary from year to year.</div><div>"The World Bank has been funding about US$1B on average over the past four or five years"</div><div>The WBG has been funding about US$1B on average over the past four or five years, and for the coming years we project that this level will remain. This is only a couple of percent of the amount mobilised worldwide for hydropower development each year, but if you look at the poorest countries it becomes more significant.</div><div>Does the Bank believe that hydropower can play a key role in tackling climate change and is this directing its financial decisions?</div><div><br></div><div>J-M D:The WBG's goals are to eradicate poverty by 2030 and promote shared prosperity for the poorest 40% in a sustainable fashion. We believe that tackling climate change is a critical part of reaching these goals. Hydropower is affordable, very clean and has limited greenhouse gas emissions, especially compared with those from burning fossil fuels and many developing countries still have a large untapped hydropower potential.</div><div>Along with constrained access to electricity, by 2025, 2.4 billion people will be living in countries without enough water to meet all their needs. Water security is threatened by mismanagement of available water resources and increasing changes in weather patterns due to climate change.</div><div>Multipurpose hydropower dams can also support adaptation to increasingly extreme weather conditions by strengthening a country's ability to regulate and store water and so resist flood and drought shocks.</div><div>The WBG and its clients therefore recognise that responsible hydropower is part of the solution for tackling the development challenges outlined in our mission.</div><div>How is the bank committed to scaling up efforts to utilise the maximum strategic value of hydropower resources?</div><div><br></div><div>J-M D:Fifteen of the top 20 countries identified as having the biggest electricity access gap by the United Nation's Sustainable Energy for All initiative are countries with significant water resources that could be partially tapped for sustainable hydropower. These countries include some 750 million people who do not have access to electricity. At the same time hydropower with storage complements variable renewable energy sources such as wind and solar, and provides essential functions for power system control.</div><div>"Hydropower with storage can also give multi-purpose benefits for flood management, irrigation and water supply"</div><div>Hydropower with storage can also give multi-purpose benefits for flood management, irrigation and water supply. In our Country Partnership Frameworks that we develop together with our client countries, hydropower will likely thus get a more and more prominent role in the energy and water sectors.</div><div>Are there any key projects you've recently committed finance?</div><div><br></div><div>J-M D: Examples of hydropower projects that we have committed financing to in recent times, and which show the natural distribution of size and type of projects that we support, include the:</div><div>Trung Son Hydropower project (260MW) in Vietnam.</div><div>Tarbela IV hydropower extension project (1410MW) in Pakistan.</div><div>Upper Cisokan pumped storage hydroelectric project (1040MW) in Indonesia.</div><div>Rusumo Falls transboundary project (80MW) in Rwanda, Burundi, and Tanzania.</div><div>Kali Gandaki rehabilitation (48MW) and Ruma Khola micro hydro power (51 kW) projects in Nepal.</div><div>Based on an interview published in the April 2014 issue of International Water Power & Dam Construction magazine.</div>Weiqi Zhanghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16657414981487705201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5039910341338893506.post-13713902753527583722014-04-29T19:09:00.000-07:002014-04-29T19:10:01.297-07:00Families, Monks Want Chinese Dam Canceled<div><div id="title">Families, Monks Want Chinese Dam Canceled</div> <div id="byline">By Khoun Narim</div><div id="byline">Cambodian Daily, 29 April 2014</div><div id="byline"><br></div><div id="byline">Members of an ethnic minority community facing eviction from their ancestral homeland to make way for a Chinese hydropower dam in Koh Kong province—and the monks and NGO helping them—Monday once again urged the firm and the government not to go ahead with the project.</div><p><span id="more-57624"></span></p> <p>Hundreds of Chong families are facing eviction at the hands of Sinohydro (Cambodia) United, a Chinese firm that recently took over plans to build a 108-MW dam in the Areng Valley, in the heart of the Cardamom Protected Forest. Construction, which has yet to start, is expected to flood some 20,000 hectares, including the community’s sacred forests and a critical habitat for the endangered Siamese Crocodile.</p> <p>“If the dam is built it will hurt our traditional ways and our livelihood, which depends on the forest,” said Has Ley, speaking at a press conference organized by the NGO Mother Nature in Phnom Penh.</p> <p>Members of the Independent Monks Network for Social Justice, which has also taken up the cause, said they will soon organize protests in front of the Chinese Embassy and Sinohydro’s Phnom Penh office.</p> <p>The families, monks and NGOs believe Sinohydro may be using the project merly as cover to plunder the area’s trees and minerals. Some claim the project is not viable, and two Chinese firms have already pulled out.</p> <p>“It’s not a real dam,” said Mother Nature cofounder Alex Gonzalez-Davidson. “It’s a project that doesn’t make any sense but it’s still going to go ahead because of corruption and other things.”</p> <p>Sinohydro officials in charge of the project could not be reached for comment. Officials at the provincial department of mines and energy could also not be reached.</p> <p>In March, department director Pich Siyun said all the necessary studies for the project had been finished and that the affected families had agreed to resettle.</p> <p>The families say they have not agreed to the move and for the past several weeks have kept watch over the only road leading in and out of the project area, preparing to block it if the firm attempts to begin construction.</p> <p><em>(Additional reporting by Zsombor Peter)</em></p><p>http://www.cambodiadaily.com/news/families-monks-want-chinese-dam-canceled-57624/</p></div><div><div><br></div></div>Weiqi Zhanghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16657414981487705201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5039910341338893506.post-89861083336572800732014-04-25T20:02:00.000-07:002014-04-25T20:03:55.198-07:00Analysis on projects that could dry Lake Turkana(Sorry for x-postings)
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<br><a href="http://gga.org/stories/editions/aif-22-apart-at-the-seams/fire-on-the-water">http://gga.org/stories/editions/aif-22-apart-at-the-seams/fire-on-the-water</a>
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<br>Fire on the water
<br>The two neighbours are complicit in hydro-electric projects that could dry up Lake Turkana and destroy the lives of those who live near it.
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<br>by Ben Rawlence
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<br>May 01, 2014
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<br>Ben Rawlence is researching and writing a book about Somali refugees in Kenya with the support of the Open Society foundation. He is the author of "Radio Congo: Signals of Hope from Africa's Deadliest War". Mr Rawlence received his master's in international relations from the University of Chicago. He lives in London.
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<br> Here today...
<br>In the middle of the arid red desert of Kenya�s far north-west is a miraculous band of green water: Lake Turkana, the world�s largest desert lake. During calm weather, algae float on the surface and turn the lake green. This has given rise to the lake�s other name: the Jade Sea. It is also known as Anam Ka�alakol, meaning the �sea of many fish�, in the local Turkana language. Nearly 300,000 people living near the lake depend on it for fishing, farming, watering livestock and drinking water, according to US-based campaign groups International Rivers and the Oakland Institute.
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<br>This may end soon, however, if the predictions of a December 2013 report from Oxford University�s African Studies Centre hold true. The Lake Turkana area, also known as the cradle of mankind for its abundance of hominid fossils, has held water for at least 5m years. Evaporation rings at the water�s edge function like ice cores at the poles, providing an archive of climate information. It is why the lake is a UNESCO World Heritage site as well as an environmental wonder.
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<br>This year, however, may mark the beginning of Lake Turkana�s slow demise.
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<br>The lake�s northern tip touches Kenya�s border with Ethiopia. Its main source is the Omo river, which rises out of the green hills in southern Ethiopia, about 600km upstream of the lake, spilling out into a rich fertile delta before it meanders into Lake Turkana. But Ethiopia, in desperate need of foreign exchange and electricity, has plans to choke this vital artery. Many warn that Lake Turkana may suffer the same fate as the Aral Sea in central Asia, which was once one of the world�s largest lakes, but is now nearly bone dry because its waters were diverted for irrigation.
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<br>The Ethiopian government has built Africa�s tallest dam, the 243-metre high Gibe III, on the Omo river. It is the third in a cascading series of hydroelectric projects. Other dams, Gibe IV and V, will follow soon. When the rains begin falling in May they will also start filling the Gibe III dam. In addition, downstream of the barrage, an Ethiopian parastatal is digging canals in the Omo Valley to irrigate up to 375,000 hectares of sugar plantations. In the process, Human Rights Watch says, the Ethiopian military has been evicting indigenous agro-pastoral communities such as the Mursi, Bodi and Suri.
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<br>The Gibe hydroelectric and irrigation scheme has been mired in controversy from the start. The Ethiopian government never made an official announcement of this irrigation scheme before construction began. It never carried out proper environmental and social impact assessments. It never consulted the people living near the river, according to the US-based pressure groups Human Rights Watch, the Oakland Institute, International Rivers and the Oxford study.
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<br>In the absence of any official estimates, the Oxford University study is an attempt to predict Gibe III�s effects on Lake Turkana. The report�s author, hydrologist Sean Avery, forecasts that the water diverted to feed commercial agriculture could result in a 16- to 20-metre permanent drop in Lake Turkana�s levels. The lake could reduce to two puddles, he says. And with increased salinity and evaporation, it will no longer be able to support its fish stocks. Hundreds of thousands of indigenous people who rely on fishing as a way of life will need to find alternative livelihoods.
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<br>The Kenyan government and other Western donors have not protested or opposed the potential destruction of this unique ecosystem and irreplaceable natural jewel. The Gibe III hydroelectric plant, Africa�s biggest, will generate 1,860 megawatts (MW) of power. This electricity will surge into the Eastern Africa Power Pool, a regional market set up in 2005, for onward transmission to Kenya and the region.
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<br>Other major projects are planned near the lake that link Ethiopia, Kenya and South Sudan. Kenya is building sub-Saharan Africa�s biggest wind farm, the Lake Turkana Wind Power project, 9km from the lake, expected to produce 300MW. Oil has also been discovered in the Turkana region, 100km south-west of the lake. A massive underground aquifer estimated to hold 250 billion cubic metres of water�equal to Lake Turkana�was discovered last year. The government claims this artesian basin could fulfil Kenya�s needs for 70 years. In addition, a $21 billion road, rail and pipeline network linking a new deep-water port at Lamu on the Indian Ocean to landlocked southern Ethiopia and South Sudan is planned to include a new resort city on the shores of Lake Turkana�if there is any water left.
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<br>Kenya is not alone in its silence on Ethiopia�s hydroelectric and irrigation scheme. International financial institutions are also complicit. The World Bank and the African Development Bank (ADB) withdrew from supporting the controversial dam project in 2009, but did not baulk at paying for the transmission line that will move the electricity across the border to Kenya. The World Bank approved the power line in late 2012, ignoring its own environmental safeguards that would have triggered a more thorough impact assessment, claiming instead that the line was simply connecting the national grids of the two countries.
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<br>Ties linking the three countries near the lake are proceeding at breakneck pace. But the building of the Gibe III dam and the irrigation scheme pose huge accountability questions. What happens when projects are conceived in secrecy, planned in violation of national and international standards, and executed at the barrel of a gun? Who takes the blame for international institutions that turn a blind eye to environmental risks and the lack of consultation?
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<br>By their nature, cross-border projects are harder to hold to account than purely national ones. Lobbying two or more governments as well as international financial institutions and their major shareholders (the United States, China, Europe and Japan) is tough and expensive. Vested interests are deep and strong and the argument is rarely clear. Critics claim, rightfully, that Ethiopia and Kenya should not be denied the right to exploit their natural resources; nor should they uphold ancient ways of life for their own sake. However, in solid democracies major infrastructure projects proceed in an open manner under proper scrutiny and without trampling the rights of the people whom they are intended to serve.
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<br>The lone Kenyan voice raised against the plans has been a small group called �The Friends of Lake Turkana�, led by charismatic activist Ikal Angelei. The Kenyan parliament, aside from asking a few questions, has been absent from the arena.
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<br>Silence reigns in Ethiopia, where the political environment is much harsher than in Kenya. The Omo Valley�s indigenous people, who are being evicted from their land to make way for the irrigated plantations, are unsophisticated in modern lobbying and almost completely disenfranchised in Ethiopia�s one-party state. Western NGOs, for the most part, have led the campaign to expose the lack of consultation, consent and social and environmental impact assessments as well as the human rights violations associated with the forced evictions and resettlement of the indigenous people.
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<br>The work of Human Rights Watch, UK-based Survival International and the Oakland Institute in publicising the expulsions prompted the African Commission on Human and Peoples� Rights last November to write to the Ethiopian government to stop the resettlement of the Omo Valley people while it investigates the allegations. The UK and US governments have suppressed information about human rights abuses connected with the irrigation schemes, according to a July 2013 report by the Oakland Institute. Another 2012 report by Human Rights Watch showed that the UK�s Department for International Development (DFID) knowingly subsidised the resettlement of the indigenous peoples. DFID denied the claims but admitted its funds might have contributed �indirectly� to the activities of local governments, including resettlement.
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<br>The NGOs have made some positive impact. In January 2014 the US Congress ordered that American dollars �not be used to support activities that directly or indirectly involve forced evictions�, according to an appropriations bill. But, while important, these legal moves are likely to prove too little, too late. In Lake Turkana, regional power plays have worked against accountability. The complexity of such a large project and the many actors involved militates against holding anyone to account.
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<br>Ethiopia may have the right to develop the dam and the agriculture but not without reference to its own laws, which make very clear the rights of indigenous peoples to their own land, to consultation and to compensation in the event of eviction. Kenya, too, has the right to develop its resources but it also has a responsibility to protect its own citizens. Funders such as the World Bank, DFID, the US Agency for International Development, the ADB, and the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China have a responsibility to follow their own procedures and abide by their own codes.
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<br>Bigger and more ambitious infrastructure projects can only proceed lawfully and benefit citizens if all the players involved are held to account, a painstaking process. Lake Turkana shows that without sustained democratic movements to keep governments in check, regional integration can easily be turned from a force for good to a torrent of tyranny.
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<br><a href="http://org.salsalabs.com/o/2486/unsubscribe.jsp">http://org.salsalabs.com/o/2486/unsubscribe.jsp</a>Weiqi Zhanghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16657414981487705201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5039910341338893506.post-59967739904135009082014-04-24T10:11:00.000-07:002014-04-24T10:13:01.537-07:00Ghana's energy prod slows with droughtHydrodependency and climate change don't mix� Too bad Ghana didn't figure that out before damming Bui Nat'l Park and displacing people (for an update by a local researcher on what is going on w/ Bui Dam resettlers: <a href="http://www.internationalrivers.org/node/8269">http://www.internationalrivers.org/node/8269</a>)
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<br>Ghana�s energy production to slow due to Akosombo Dam
<br>By Ghana News -SpyGhana.com
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<br><a href="http://www.spyghana.com/ghanas-energy-production-slow-due-akosombo-dam/">http://www.spyghana.com/ghanas-energy-production-slow-due-akosombo-dam/</a>
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<br>The Akosombo Dam is expected to record poor inflow of water in the next two years, which will lead to a shortfall in electricity generated from hydro, an informed analysis of water inflow into the dam has shown.
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<br>The minimum operating water level for the Akosombo Dam is pegged at 240 feet. However, the water inflow into the lake has recorded consistent reduction in year-end inflow since 2010. The water level in December 2010 was 275.40 ftt; 271.97 ft in 2011; 268.50 ft in 2012; 257.80 ft in 2013.
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<br>For the first quarter of 2014, the water level has continued to dwindle. January recorded an inflow of 256 ft; 254 ft in February; and 252 ft in March.
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<br>Historical analysis of the water inflow into the Akosombo Dam indicates that there are 24 years out of 47 years (51%) that average-to-above inflows were recorded. Typically, one year of below average inflow is followed by another year of below average inflow.
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<br>The worrying trend has raised concerns about mitigation measures put in place to bridge any potential shortfall in hydro power generation.
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<br>This portends an increase in thermal power generation and a cutback on hydro power �reversing the current energy mix of 63 percent hydro and 36 percent thermal power generation going forward.
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<br>Given the cost of generating power with crude, consumers are ultimately expected to pay more for power going by the Public Utilities Regulations Commission�s (PURC) automatic tariff adjustment formula if gas supply from both Nigeria and the Jubilee Field is not available in the required quantities.
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<br>�We will experience challenges come 2015 and 2016 if we don�t manage the reservoir well. The earlier we get an alternative source of fuel the better. About 41-42 percent of global electricity generation is coal-based. We need to explore alternatives now,� Dr. Kwabena Donkor, Chairman of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Mines and Energy told the B&FT
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<br>The Akosombo Hydro Generating Station, the largest hydro installation in the country, generates 1020 Megawatts of power. Each of the installation�s six turbines generates 170MW of electricity. The Kpong Hydro Generating Station also generates 160 MW from four installed units.
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<br>The Station, according to sources, has been over-drafting for the last six years. In 2013, the Station exceeded its planned generation of 7,100 GWh by 780GWh to supplement the thermal power generated by the VRA plants and other independent power producers. The Station is also expected to over-draft about 780GWh this year.
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<br>The over-drafting of waters of the Akosombo Lake for power generation has been necessitated by the power challenges brought on by the shortage of gas from fields in Nigeria.
<br>The country�s energy-mix is made up of 1180 Megawatts hydro by the Volta River Authority; Bui Hydro 400MW; thermal (VRA) 922MW; thermal � Independent Power Producers 310MW; and solar 2.5MW.
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<br>Rising electricity demand, which is driving a shift from hydro power generation to thermal power generation, according to energy experts requires more investors in the oil and gas sector that will produce gas to power thermal plants.
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<br>The largest power producer, the VRA, has had to rely on the importation of expensive crude oil to power its plants.
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<br>Source: Ghana B&FT
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<br><a href="http://org.salsalabs.com/o/2486/unsubscribe.jsp">http://org.salsalabs.com/o/2486/unsubscribe.jsp</a>Weiqi Zhanghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16657414981487705201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5039910341338893506.post-88995519697849212262014-04-21T12:53:00.000-07:002014-04-21T13:01:36.019-07:00EU shuns African hydro power projects<div class="BlocArticle_Pays_Top colorPub" style="color: rgb(118, 191, 205); overflow: hidden; position: relative; margin-bottom: 10px; font-family: Arial; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); "><div class="BlocArticle_Pays_Top_Right" style="font-size: 11px; color: rgb(109, 113, 117);"><span class="BlocArticle_Pays_Top_Right_Rub" style="font-weight: bold; ">ELECTRICITY</span><br><span class="default_art_infos" style="font-family: arial; font-size: 12px; color: rgb(0, 147, 174); ">n°720 - 08/04/2014</span></div></div><div class="BlocArticle_Titre" style="font-size: 22px; font-weight: bold; font-family: Arial; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); position: static; z-index: auto; ">EU shuns hydro power projects</div><div class="BlocArticle_Chapo BlocArticle_Texte" style="background-image: url(http://www.africaintelligence.com/images/aem/icons/arrows/arrow5.jpg); color: rgb(90, 94, 98); text-align: justify; font-family: arial; line-height: 20px; text-indent: 12px; font-weight: bold; margin-top: 9px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); background-position: 0px 6px; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; ">The European authorities have turned away from financing dams, leaving the way open for Asian government donors.</div><div class="BlocArticle_Texte" id="divArticle" style="color: rgb(38, 38, 38); text-align: justify; font-family: arial; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); position: static; z-index: auto; "><p>An <b><a class="detail_art_body_text_rech" target="_blank" href="http://www.africaintelligence.com/search/search.aspx?keywords=EU-Africa%20Business%20Forum" title="Click to launch a new search" rech="EU-Africa Business Forum" style="color: rgb(38, 38, 38); text-decoration: none; ">EU-Africa Business Forum</a></b> roundtable on sustainable energy that served as curtain-raiser for the EU-Africa summit meeting in Brussels on April 2-3 made it abundantly clear hydro power is no longer a priority of the<i>Africa EU Energy Partnership</i>. <br><br>The projects backed by European overseas development institutions like<b><a class="detail_art_body_text_rech" target="_blank" href="http://www.africaintelligence.com/search/search.aspx?keywords=Proparco" title="Click to launch a new search" rech="Proparco" style="color: rgb(38, 38, 38); text-decoration: none; ">Proparco</a></b>, <b><a class="detail_art_body_text_rech" target="_blank" href="http://www.africaintelligence.com/search/search.aspx?keywords=CDC" title="Click to launch a new search" rech="CDC" style="color: rgb(38, 38, 38); text-decoration: none; ">CDC</a></b>, <b><a class="detail_art_body_text_rech" target="_blank" href="http://www.africaintelligence.com/search/search.aspx?keywords=KfW" title="Click to launch a new search" rech="KfW" style="color: rgb(38, 38, 38); text-decoration: none; ">KfW</a></b> and the <b><a class="detail_art_body_text_rech" target="_blank" href="http://www.africaintelligence.com/search/search.aspx?keywords=European%20Investment%20Bank" title="Click to launch a new search" rech="European Investment Bank" style="color: rgb(38, 38, 38); text-decoration: none; ">European Investment Bank</a></b> (EIB) primarily involved solar, wind and geothermic power. The spotlights were on the German firm <b><a class="detail_art_body_text_rech" target="_blank" href="http://www.africaintelligence.com/search/search.aspx?keywords=Mobisol" title="Click to launch a new search" rech="Mobisol" style="color: rgb(38, 38, 38); text-decoration: none; ">Mobisol</a></b> which installed 3,000 solar cell systems in Tanzania and Ghana, and <b><a class="detail_art_body_text_rech" target="_blank" href="http://www.africaintelligence.com/search/search.aspx?keywords=Ormat%20Technologies" title="Click to launch a new search" rech="Ormat Technologies" style="color: rgb(38, 38, 38); text-decoration: none; ">Ormat Technologies</a></b> which put together finance for Kenya's 110 MW Olkaria 3 geothermic plant. <br><br>No mention was made of any major African hydro power project even though the Africa EU Partnership staged a workshop in Addis Ababa in February that underscored the determination of European financial institutions to help increase Africa's generation capacity by 10,000 MW. The continent's capacity in 2010 was 26, 762 MW in 2010 and it has risen by only 2,000 MW in the past two years. <br><br>The deliberate choice to sideline hydro power appears to stem from growing opposition to big dams that was voiced in the European Parliament in 2011 when a report by British Euro MP <b><a class="detail_art_body_text_rech" target="_blank" href="http://www.africaintelligence.com/search/search.aspx?keywords=Nirj%20Deva" title="Click to launch a new search" rech="Nirj Deva" style="color: rgb(38, 38, 38); text-decoration: none; ">Nirj Deva</a></b> won wide support, including among Socialists and Greens. The EU now turns its back on the hydropower market in developing countries, leaving it to emerging powers like China and India. <br><br></p></div><div class="BlocArticle_Social" style="overflow: hidden; position: relative; width: 483px; font-family: Arial; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); "><div class="BlocArticle_Social_Left" style="float: left; font-size: 11px; width: 316px; color: rgb(89, 89, 89);">© Indigo Publications. Reproduction and dissemination prohibited (photocopy, Intranet...) without written permission. 11263200</div><div class="BlocArticle_Social_Right" style="float: right;"> </div></div>Weiqi Zhanghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16657414981487705201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5039910341338893506.post-17096160001150017742014-04-17T11:48:00.000-07:002014-04-17T11:51:21.565-07:00The twisted tale of Inga 3<div>(Sorry for x-postings)</div><div><br></div><div><a href="https://www.devex.com/news/the-twisted-tale-of-inga-3-83232">https://www.devex.com/news/the-twisted-tale-of-inga-3-83232</a></div><div><br></div><div>The twisted tale of Inga 3</div><div>By Michael Igoe, Paul Stephens17 April 2014</div><div> </div><div><br></div><div>An aerial view of the existing semi-functional Inga dam on the Congo River. A new dam, the Grand Inga Dam, is being proposed and is currently the world's largest hydropower scheme. Photo by: International Rivers. Photo by: International Rivers / CC BY-NC-SA</div><div>In the lush southwest corner of the Democratic Republic of Congo, a massive dam project on one of Africa's largest rivers has created a twisted tale of political maneuvering and heated debates on the tradeoffs of economic development that has tripped up foreign aid leaders in Washington as they decide whether to support a project that is hailed as a solution to Africa's "energy poverty."</div><div><br></div><div>World Bank President Jim Kim says the project, known as the Inga 3 base chute, the next step in what would become the largest hydropower complex in history, is exactly the type of "bold" initiative a revamped and reenergized World Bank ought to support, and he is vying for U.S. support.</div><div><br></div><div>The debate about whether the U.S. government — the world's largest bilateral aid donor — should support the project has mostly been waged behind closed doors. But as Kim, who was nominated for his current job by President Barack Obama, tries to negotiate U.S. support for the controversial project, he has set off fierce debates and met strong resistance from the halls of Congress.</div><div><br></div><div>The lack of a clear U.S. policy on the dam and other energy projects raises tough questions about how thoroughly the Obama administration has thought through its Power Africa strategy, which aims to double access to electricity in sub-Saharan Africa.</div><div><br></div><div>Despite the concerns, the World Bank's board of directors approved last month a $73 million loan for a project to provide the initial technical assistance to plan the construction of Inga 3.</div><div><br></div><div>That project would eventually cost between $9 billion and $12 billion to build and would be an important step toward construction of the Grand Inga Dam, a massive hydropower project that would cost roughly $80 billion. Its potential 40,000 megawatts of output would dwarf that of China's Three Gorges Dam and double the African continent's energy output.</div><div><br></div><div>"We need this power desperately in Africa," Kim said at the Council on Foreign Relations earlier this month. "Today, the combined energy usage of the billion people who live in the entire continent of Africa equals what Belgium offers to its 11 million residents. This is a form of energy apartheid that we must tackle if we are serious about helping African countries grow and create opportunities for all Africans."</div><div><br></div><div>"No choice" to support Inga?</div><div><br></div><div>The idea for a giant dam across the section of the lower Congo River known as Inga Falls — a section of rapids spanning 9 miles — is hardly new. It was first dreamt up in the early 20th century and has captured the imaginations of engineers, government officials and foreign power companies for decades.</div><div><br></div><div>More recently, the plan has become the focus of attention for development officials like Kim who see the possibility, with a single project, of making a huge leap toward alleviating Africa's energy poverty, a cause célèbre for development agencies and advocates — including Bono, the U2 frontman and humanitarian — which has managed to attract bipartisan support in the U.S. Congress, partially due to an emphasis on including U.S. businesses in African energy solutions.</div><div><br></div><div>Kim told reporters that, given the reality of climate change and the energy needs in Africa, the World Bank has "no choice" but to seriously consider supporting a plan for Inga.</div><div><br></div><div>Not everyone sees the Inga scheme as such a no-brainer. Many of the hurdles to such a large construction project, and concerns about whether it would actually benefit locals, remain. And if the political wrangling over the project in the United States is any indication, mega-dams like Inga are going to be at the center of the debate about the role international development institutions should play to deliver electricity to poor people around the world.</div><div><br></div><div>In late December, Rajiv Shah, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, tweeted a photo of himself with a smiling crowd of World Bank, U.S. and Congolese officials in front of the Inga 3 site at the end of a "great day" touring the area. Other top USAID officials — including Power Africa Coordinator Andy Herscowitz — followed suit with their own Twitter enthusiasm.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Rajiv Shah tweets about the Inga 3 site.</div><div>During the visit, Shah told a Bloomberg reporter USAID would consider contributing to the construction of the dam. The announcement raised eyebrows given USAID's avoidance of large hydropower projects elsewhere on the continent, and the fact that the DRC is not one of the countries included in the Obama administration's legacy-building Power Africa initiative.</div><div><br></div><div>But the massive potential of the Grand Inga scheme had obviously captured the administrator's imagination at a time when alleviating energy poverty in Africa has risen to the fore of U.S. development policy.</div><div><br></div><div>If the U.S. government plays a role in facilitating the successful construction of the Grand Inga dam complex, it would mean helping to generate enough megawattage in a single project for President Obama's Power Africa initiative to reach its goal.</div><div><br></div><div>With official development assistance representing a smaller and smaller piece of total overseas capital flows, Inga 3 — and eventually Grand Inga — is the kind of "transformational project" that opens up opportunities for aid agencies to leverage limited funds to achieve outsized gains on poverty reduction and economic growth. Not engaging on Inga 3 could appear to aid leaders like a lost opportunity to stay relevant in a rapidly changing development landscape.</div><div><br></div><div>U.S. officials on the defense</div><div><br></div><div>Since the visit, the Power Africa team has grown much quieter about Inga, and about any projects outside of the original six Power Africa countries. That's likely because Shah's comments on the Inga initiative, as vague as they may have been, quickly spurred a backlash from Capitol Hill that surprised even close observers.</div><div><br></div><div>That backlash came in the form of a directive, embedded deep in the omnibus spending bill for 2014, that instructed the Treasury to advise the U.S. representatives to the World Bank and other international financial institutions that "it is the policy of the United States to oppose any loan, grant, strategy or policy of such institution to support the construction of any large hydroelectric dam."</div><div><br></div><div>These directives, known as mandates, have become a fairly common way for members of Congress to assert their will over multilateral investment banks using the power of the purse. This one came from veteran Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy, who sees potential U.S. involvement in Inga 3 as a huge mistake.</div><div><br></div><div>U.S. foreign assistance agencies, including USAID, rely on Leahy to bankroll their programs. He is one of a few members of Congress who have been vocal in their support of a robust foreign aid budget, and he pulls funding strings as the chair of the Senate appropriations subcommittee on state and foreign operations.</div><div><br></div><div>But the senator also uses his leverage as a vital foreign aid advocate to speak out against U.S. development initiatives and programs he feels do not make the grade. When USAID's "Cuban Twitter" program came to light two weeks ago, Leahy was one of its highest-profile critics, calling the idea "dumb, dumb, dumb."</div><div><br></div><div>Leahy holds similar views about U.S. government support for Inga 3, according to an aide who spoke with Devex about the senator's concerns.</div><div><br></div><div>"The Inga dam … is a classic example in a country where everything that can go wrong often does, and particularly because it could be the first of many similar projects on that river which sustains the livelihoods of millions of people," the aide told Devex, citing the potential environmental and social costs of the project.</div><div><br></div><div>"If you add all those factors together," the aide suggested, "it is unwise to use public funds for projects of this scale, particularly in countries where corruption is rampant and where often the electricity is either exported or sold to industry and doesn't benefit the people who need it most."</div><div><br></div><div>Leahy is particularly concerned, the aide noted, that the power the Inga dam will produce won't be accessible to rural residents who currently live off the energy grid. Much of the power from Inga 3 is expected to be sold to South African power offtakers or directed to DRC's industrial mining interests, which currently face a power shortage.</div><div><br></div><div>The project would also flood Bundi Valley in southern DRC, displacing an estimated 8,000 people, according to a U.S. government cable obtained by Wikileaks.</div><div><br></div><div>The mandate tucked into the 2014 omnibus spending bill was "intended to signal that the Congress wants assurance that mega-projects like this make sense in terms of the long-term economic, environmental and social costs before public funds are used."</div><div><br></div><div>Despite uncertainty, bank officials charge ahead</div><div><br></div><div>After postponing a vote for more than a month, the World Bank's board of directors approved funding on March 20, with the U.S. executive director abstaining. In the official position paper on the U.S. vote, released by the Treasury Department, the U.S. executive director's office explained that "the United States believes that given the enormous challenges associated with Inga 3, the governance and environmental risks required further mitigation as part of this TA (technical assistance) proposal."</div><div><br></div><div>While the paper did not cite Leahy's mandate as a reason for the abstention, it seemed to have its intended effect.</div><div><br></div><div>But the rest of Congress is hardly lined up behind Leahy, and the mandate the senator inserted in the omnibus bill will expire at the end of the fiscal year. Efforts to shore up future U.S. support for Inga 3 seems to be underway already. Last month, the House Foreign Affairs Committee approved the Electrify Africa Act after inserting language that counters the Senate mandate.</div><div><br></div><div>While the bill doesn't mention any other form of energy specifically, it goes out of its way to say that "it is the policy of the United States ... to encourage private sector and international support for construction of hydroelectric dams in sub-Saharan Africa," albeit only ones that are in the "national security interests of the United States" and built following "international best practices" for environmental and social safeguards — another mixed message from the legislative branch.</div><div><br></div><div>Scott Morris, a former treasury official who oversaw U.S. relations with the World Bank and other international financial institutions for the Obama administration, sees the lack of a clear policy on these issues as hugely detrimental to U.S. development interests.</div><div><br></div><div>"These are highly complex projects, and that's the very reason you need the multilateral development banks involved," Morris said, adding that backroom maneuvering like Leahy's had become increasingly frustrating.</div><div><br></div><div>"There's no reason that the mandate in the omnibus couldn't have been more carefully crafted instead of creating a political straight-jacket for the U.S.," he said. "And where are the hearings on these issues where we have a real airing of both sides?"</div><div><br></div><div>Who's going to build it?</div><div><br></div><div>Many feel that Inga 3 is going to happen one way or another, and that Grand Inga is too valuable a prize to go ignored indefinitely — particularly at a time when the narrative around development in Africa is shifting from one of foreign aid to one characterized by partnership and economic growth potential.</div><div><br></div><div>If the U.S. government and U.S. businesses remain on the sidelines of Inga development, Chinese state-supported companies, whose presence in Africa is already widely felt, could take a leading role in financing and constructing the massive dam complex. In fact, a Chinese consortium led by Sinohydro and China Three Gorges Corp. is said to be bidding for the Inga project. Much of the support for the Power Africa initiative in Congress is fueled by a desire to help U.S. companies compete against Chinese interests in Africa.</div><div><br></div><div>Additionally, many supporters of the project like Morris — and even some skeptics — feel the United States could play an important watchdog role through its own involvement in Inga's development. U.S. government agencies, their argumentation goes, are more likely to account for and guard against the massive potential social and economic consequences the Inga dam could entail, the types of consequences that are no stranger to those in the path of Chinese hydropower projects.</div><div><br></div><div>Even without official U.S. support, the World Bank's technical assistance project will go forward, but the U.S. government's lack of a clear policy on hydropower projects of this kind raises questions that extend beyond Inga's risks and into the overall strategy undergirding President Obama's Power Africa initiative.</div><div><br></div><div>A number of observers have raised the concern that Power Africa's leaders may be more interested in attaching the initiative's name to major power generation deals than they are in providing a realistic, operational plan for linking more African people, particularly those living in rural areas, to some kind of reliable power supply. The Inga dam project, and the USAID chief's enthusiasm for it, could reinforce some of that skepticism.</div><div><br></div><div>The debate continues</div><div><br></div><div>The battle over data on the project is sure to continue.</div><div><br></div><div>At a World Bank spring meeting panel last week, Vijay Iyer, a director of the bank's sustainable energy department who previously worked as the bank's task manager for Inga, reminded civil society representatives that energy poverty is hardly just a rural issue, as power generation in cities has merely kept pace with urban population growth. African cities routinely experience rolling blackouts due to energy shortages, and that inconsistent availability is a particular drain on industrial economic output and investment.</div><div><br></div><div>"Hydropower is perhaps the one largest source of clean affordable power than can be developed," Iyer said. "We have to see that sometimes, by not putting all the facts on the table, we do a disservice actually to the proliferation of good, cleaner solutions."</div><div><br></div><div>At the same event, Peter Bosshard, the president of International Rivers, an NGO, was particularly vocal in his criticism of Inga's development, referring to an Oxford University study that suggests cost valuations of the power generated by mega dams consistently fail to account for the cost and time overruns those dam projects tend to experience.</div><div><br></div><div>According to the Oxford study, 96 percent of mega-dam projects have costs overruns and 54 percent are not completed on time. And the potential for the Inga project to be derailed by corruption is a very legitimate concern given the DRC's weak institutions. The fact that a year ago SNC-Lavalin, a partner in one of three pre-qualified consortia that expressed interest in the project, was barred from winning World Bank contracts for 10 years due to alleged corruption in previous projects, has comforted no one.</div><div><br></div><div>"If Inga 3 is completed on cost and on time, it is very competitive. If it has average cost and time overruns … it ends up being very expensive," Bosshard said.</div><div><br></div><div>Of course giant dam projects aren't new to the World Bank, which financed dozens of large hydropower projects around the world throughout the second half of the 20th century. Those projects often became rallying points against the bank for environmental and human rights activists. Kim, in fact, got his start in international development providing health services to a community of Haitians living in extreme poverty after being displaced by a large dam that was partially financed by the World Bank.</div><div><br></div><div>This project would be different, Kim said in response to a question from Devex, because of the social and environmental safeguards the bank has introduced over the past 20 years and the involvement of "many stakeholders," public and private, working together.</div><div><br></div><div>"In other words, this will be a very different project than dam projects that have taken place before — one that I lived and worked near in Haiti for many, many years," he said.</div><div><br></div><div>Kim will have to hope that as the debate surrounding Inga 3 heats up, his prior experience on the front lines of dam displacement will be seen by policymakers — and residents of the Bundi Valley — as a mark of credibility, not irony.</div><div><br></div><div>Want to learn more about Inga or share your thoughts on it? Please leave a comment or question below or tweet @PaulDStephens and @twIgoe.</div> ________________________________________________ You received this message as a subscriber on the list: <a href="mailto:dams@list.internationalrivers.org">dams@list.internationalrivers.org</a> To be removed from the list, please visit: <a href="http://org.salsalabs.com/o/2486/unsubscribe.jsp">http://org.salsalabs.com/o/2486/unsubscribe.jsp</a> Weiqi Zhanghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16657414981487705201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5039910341338893506.post-87198270234258483362014-04-17T10:47:00.000-07:002014-04-17T10:50:41.490-07:00The twisted tale of Inga 3<div><a href="https://www.devex.com/news/the-twisted-tale-of-inga-3-83232">https://www.devex.com/news/the-twisted-tale-of-inga-3-83232</a></div><div><br></div><div>The twisted tale of Inga 3</div><div>By Michael Igoe, Paul Stephens17 April 2014</div><div> </div><div><br></div><div>An aerial view of the existing semi-functional Inga dam on the Congo River. A new dam, the Grand Inga Dam, is being proposed and is currently the world's largest hydropower scheme. Photo by: International Rivers. Photo by: International Rivers / CC BY-NC-SA</div><div>In the lush southwest corner of the Democratic Republic of Congo, a massive dam project on one of Africa's largest rivers has created a twisted tale of political maneuvering and heated debates on the tradeoffs of economic development that has tripped up foreign aid leaders in Washington as they decide whether to support a project that is hailed as a solution to Africa's "energy poverty."</div><div><br></div><div>World Bank President Jim Kim says the project, known as the Inga 3 base chute, the next step in what would become the largest hydropower complex in history, is exactly the type of "bold" initiative a revamped and reenergized World Bank ought to support, and he is vying for U.S. support.</div><div><br></div><div>The debate about whether the U.S. government — the world's largest bilateral aid donor — should support the project has mostly been waged behind closed doors. But as Kim, who was nominated for his current job by President Barack Obama, tries to negotiate U.S. support for the controversial project, he has set off fierce debates and met strong resistance from the halls of Congress.</div><div><br></div><div>The lack of a clear U.S. policy on the dam and other energy projects raises tough questions about how thoroughly the Obama administration has thought through its Power Africa strategy, which aims to double access to electricity in sub-Saharan Africa.</div><div><br></div><div>Despite the concerns, the World Bank's board of directors approved last month a $73 million loan for a project to provide the initial technical assistance to plan the construction of Inga 3.</div><div><br></div><div>That project would eventually cost between $9 billion and $12 billion to build and would be an important step toward construction of the Grand Inga Dam, a massive hydropower project that would cost roughly $80 billion. Its potential 40,000 megawatts of output would dwarf that of China's Three Gorges Dam and double the African continent's energy output.</div><div><br></div><div>"We need this power desperately in Africa," Kim said at the Council on Foreign Relations earlier this month. "Today, the combined energy usage of the billion people who live in the entire continent of Africa equals what Belgium offers to its 11 million residents. This is a form of energy apartheid that we must tackle if we are serious about helping African countries grow and create opportunities for all Africans."</div><div><br></div><div>"No choice" to support Inga?</div><div><br></div><div>The idea for a giant dam across the section of the lower Congo River known as Inga Falls — a section of rapids spanning 9 miles — is hardly new. It was first dreamt up in the early 20th century and has captured the imaginations of engineers, government officials and foreign power companies for decades.</div><div><br></div><div>More recently, the plan has become the focus of attention for development officials like Kim who see the possibility, with a single project, of making a huge leap toward alleviating Africa's energy poverty, a cause célèbre for development agencies and advocates — including Bono, the U2 frontman and humanitarian — which has managed to attract bipartisan support in the U.S. Congress, partially due to an emphasis on including U.S. businesses in African energy solutions.</div><div><br></div><div>Kim told reporters that, given the reality of climate change and the energy needs in Africa, the World Bank has "no choice" but to seriously consider supporting a plan for Inga.</div><div><br></div><div>Not everyone sees the Inga scheme as such a no-brainer. Many of the hurdles to such a large construction project, and concerns about whether it would actually benefit locals, remain. And if the political wrangling over the project in the United States is any indication, mega-dams like Inga are going to be at the center of the debate about the role international development institutions should play to deliver electricity to poor people around the world.</div><div><br></div><div>In late December, Rajiv Shah, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, tweeted a photo of himself with a smiling crowd of World Bank, U.S. and Congolese officials in front of the Inga 3 site at the end of a "great day" touring the area. Other top USAID officials — including Power Africa Coordinator Andy Herscowitz — followed suit with their own Twitter enthusiasm.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Rajiv Shah tweets about the Inga 3 site.</div><div>During the visit, Shah told a Bloomberg reporter USAID would consider contributing to the construction of the dam. The announcement raised eyebrows given USAID's avoidance of large hydropower projects elsewhere on the continent, and the fact that the DRC is not one of the countries included in the Obama administration's legacy-building Power Africa initiative.</div><div><br></div><div>But the massive potential of the Grand Inga scheme had obviously captured the administrator's imagination at a time when alleviating energy poverty in Africa has risen to the fore of U.S. development policy.</div><div><br></div><div>If the U.S. government plays a role in facilitating the successful construction of the Grand Inga dam complex, it would mean helping to generate enough megawattage in a single project for President Obama's Power Africa initiative to reach its goal.</div><div><br></div><div>With official development assistance representing a smaller and smaller piece of total overseas capital flows, Inga 3 — and eventually Grand Inga — is the kind of "transformational project" that opens up opportunities for aid agencies to leverage limited funds to achieve outsized gains on poverty reduction and economic growth. Not engaging on Inga 3 could appear to aid leaders like a lost opportunity to stay relevant in a rapidly changing development landscape.</div><div><br></div><div>U.S. officials on the defense</div><div><br></div><div>Since the visit, the Power Africa team has grown much quieter about Inga, and about any projects outside of the original six Power Africa countries. That's likely because Shah's comments on the Inga initiative, as vague as they may have been, quickly spurred a backlash from Capitol Hill that surprised even close observers.</div><div><br></div><div>That backlash came in the form of a directive, embedded deep in the omnibus spending bill for 2014, that instructed the Treasury to advise the U.S. representatives to the World Bank and other international financial institutions that "it is the policy of the United States to oppose any loan, grant, strategy or policy of such institution to support the construction of any large hydroelectric dam."</div><div><br></div><div>These directives, known as mandates, have become a fairly common way for members of Congress to assert their will over multilateral investment banks using the power of the purse. This one came from veteran Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy, who sees potential U.S. involvement in Inga 3 as a huge mistake.</div><div><br></div><div>U.S. foreign assistance agencies, including USAID, rely on Leahy to bankroll their programs. He is one of a few members of Congress who have been vocal in their support of a robust foreign aid budget, and he pulls funding strings as the chair of the Senate appropriations subcommittee on state and foreign operations.</div><div><br></div><div>But the senator also uses his leverage as a vital foreign aid advocate to speak out against U.S. development initiatives and programs he feels do not make the grade. When USAID's "Cuban Twitter" program came to light two weeks ago, Leahy was one of its highest-profile critics, calling the idea "dumb, dumb, dumb."</div><div><br></div><div>Leahy holds similar views about U.S. government support for Inga 3, according to an aide who spoke with Devex about the senator's concerns.</div><div><br></div><div>"The Inga dam … is a classic example in a country where everything that can go wrong often does, and particularly because it could be the first of many similar projects on that river which sustains the livelihoods of millions of people," the aide told Devex, citing the potential environmental and social costs of the project.</div><div><br></div><div>"If you add all those factors together," the aide suggested, "it is unwise to use public funds for projects of this scale, particularly in countries where corruption is rampant and where often the electricity is either exported or sold to industry and doesn't benefit the people who need it most."</div><div><br></div><div>Leahy is particularly concerned, the aide noted, that the power the Inga dam will produce won't be accessible to rural residents who currently live off the energy grid. Much of the power from Inga 3 is expected to be sold to South African power offtakers or directed to DRC's industrial mining interests, which currently face a power shortage.</div><div><br></div><div>The project would also flood Bundi Valley in southern DRC, displacing an estimated 8,000 people, according to a U.S. government cable obtained by Wikileaks.</div><div><br></div><div>The mandate tucked into the 2014 omnibus spending bill was "intended to signal that the Congress wants assurance that mega-projects like this make sense in terms of the long-term economic, environmental and social costs before public funds are used."</div><div><br></div><div>Despite uncertainty, bank officials charge ahead</div><div><br></div><div>After postponing a vote for more than a month, the World Bank's board of directors approved funding on March 20, with the U.S. executive director abstaining. In the official position paper on the U.S. vote, released by the Treasury Department, the U.S. executive director's office explained that "the United States believes that given the enormous challenges associated with Inga 3, the governance and environmental risks required further mitigation as part of this TA (technical assistance) proposal."</div><div><br></div><div>While the paper did not cite Leahy's mandate as a reason for the abstention, it seemed to have its intended effect.</div><div><br></div><div>But the rest of Congress is hardly lined up behind Leahy, and the mandate the senator inserted in the omnibus bill will expire at the end of the fiscal year. Efforts to shore up future U.S. support for Inga 3 seems to be underway already. Last month, the House Foreign Affairs Committee approved the Electrify Africa Act after inserting language that counters the Senate mandate.</div><div><br></div><div>While the bill doesn't mention any other form of energy specifically, it goes out of its way to say that "it is the policy of the United States ... to encourage private sector and international support for construction of hydroelectric dams in sub-Saharan Africa," albeit only ones that are in the "national security interests of the United States" and built following "international best practices" for environmental and social safeguards — another mixed message from the legislative branch.</div><div><br></div><div>Scott Morris, a former treasury official who oversaw U.S. relations with the World Bank and other international financial institutions for the Obama administration, sees the lack of a clear policy on these issues as hugely detrimental to U.S. development interests.</div><div><br></div><div>"These are highly complex projects, and that's the very reason you need the multilateral development banks involved," Morris said, adding that backroom maneuvering like Leahy's had become increasingly frustrating.</div><div><br></div><div>"There's no reason that the mandate in the omnibus couldn't have been more carefully crafted instead of creating a political straight-jacket for the U.S.," he said. "And where are the hearings on these issues where we have a real airing of both sides?"</div><div><br></div><div>Who's going to build it?</div><div><br></div><div>Many feel that Inga 3 is going to happen one way or another, and that Grand Inga is too valuable a prize to go ignored indefinitely — particularly at a time when the narrative around development in Africa is shifting from one of foreign aid to one characterized by partnership and economic growth potential.</div><div><br></div><div>If the U.S. government and U.S. businesses remain on the sidelines of Inga development, Chinese state-supported companies, whose presence in Africa is already widely felt, could take a leading role in financing and constructing the massive dam complex. In fact, a Chinese consortium led by Sinohydro and China Three Gorges Corp. is said to be bidding for the Inga project. Much of the support for the Power Africa initiative in Congress is fueled by a desire to help U.S. companies compete against Chinese interests in Africa.</div><div><br></div><div>Additionally, many supporters of the project like Morris — and even some skeptics — feel the United States could play an important watchdog role through its own involvement in Inga's development. U.S. government agencies, their argumentation goes, are more likely to account for and guard against the massive potential social and economic consequences the Inga dam could entail, the types of consequences that are no stranger to those in the path of Chinese hydropower projects.</div><div><br></div><div>Even without official U.S. support, the World Bank's technical assistance project will go forward, but the U.S. government's lack of a clear policy on hydropower projects of this kind raises questions that extend beyond Inga's risks and into the overall strategy undergirding President Obama's Power Africa initiative.</div><div><br></div><div>A number of observers have raised the concern that Power Africa's leaders may be more interested in attaching the initiative's name to major power generation deals than they are in providing a realistic, operational plan for linking more African people, particularly those living in rural areas, to some kind of reliable power supply. The Inga dam project, and the USAID chief's enthusiasm for it, could reinforce some of that skepticism.</div><div><br></div><div>The debate continues</div><div><br></div><div>The battle over data on the project is sure to continue.</div><div><br></div><div>At a World Bank spring meeting panel last week, Vijay Iyer, a director of the bank's sustainable energy department who previously worked as the bank's task manager for Inga, reminded civil society representatives that energy poverty is hardly just a rural issue, as power generation in cities has merely kept pace with urban population growth. African cities routinely experience rolling blackouts due to energy shortages, and that inconsistent availability is a particular drain on industrial economic output and investment.</div><div><br></div><div>"Hydropower is perhaps the one largest source of clean affordable power than can be developed," Iyer said. "We have to see that sometimes, by not putting all the facts on the table, we do a disservice actually to the proliferation of good, cleaner solutions."</div><div><br></div><div>At the same event, Peter Bosshard, the president of International Rivers, an NGO, was particularly vocal in his criticism of Inga's development, referring to an Oxford University study that suggests cost valuations of the power generated by mega dams consistently fail to account for the cost and time overruns those dam projects tend to experience.</div><div><br></div><div>According to the Oxford study, 96 percent of mega-dam projects have costs overruns and 54 percent are not completed on time. And the potential for the Inga project to be derailed by corruption is a very legitimate concern given the DRC's weak institutions. The fact that a year ago SNC-Lavalin, a partner in one of three pre-qualified consortia that expressed interest in the project, was barred from winning World Bank contracts for 10 years due to alleged corruption in previous projects, has comforted no one.</div><div><br></div><div>"If Inga 3 is completed on cost and on time, it is very competitive. If it has average cost and time overruns … it ends up being very expensive," Bosshard said.</div><div><br></div><div>Of course giant dam projects aren't new to the World Bank, which financed dozens of large hydropower projects around the world throughout the second half of the 20th century. Those projects often became rallying points against the bank for environmental and human rights activists. Kim, in fact, got his start in international development providing health services to a community of Haitians living in extreme poverty after being displaced by a large dam that was partially financed by the World Bank.</div><div><br></div><div>This project would be different, Kim said in response to a question from Devex, because of the social and environmental safeguards the bank has introduced over the past 20 years and the involvement of "many stakeholders," public and private, working together.</div><div><br></div><div>"In other words, this will be a very different project than dam projects that have taken place before — one that I lived and worked near in Haiti for many, many years," he said.</div><div><br></div><div>Kim will have to hope that as the debate surrounding Inga 3 heats up, his prior experience on the front lines of dam displacement will be seen by policymakers — and residents of the Bundi Valley — as a mark of credibility, not irony.</div><div><br></div><div>Want to learn more about Inga or share your thoughts on it? Please leave a comment or question below or tweet @PaulDStephens and @twIgoe.</div>Weiqi Zhanghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16657414981487705201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5039910341338893506.post-50173454081256407462014-04-03T11:05:00.000-07:002014-04-03T11:10:39.640-07:00World Bank, U.S., China Discussing Congo’s Inga Hydropower PlantWorld Bank, U.S., China Discussing Congo's Inga Hydropower Plant
<br>By Michael J. Kavanagh, Bloomberg News, April 02, 2014
<br><a href="http://www.businessweek.com/news/2014-04-02/world-bank-u-dot-s-dot-china-discussing-congo-s-inga-hydropower-plant">www.businessweek.com/news/2014-04-02/world-bank-u-dot-s-dot-china-discussing-congo-s-inga-hydropower-plant</a>
<br>
<br>The World Bank is in "active negotiations" with the U.S. government to
<br>support the Democratic Republic of Congo's $12 billion Inga 3 hydropower
<br>project, bank President Jim Yong Kim said.
<br>
<br>The lender, based in Washington, is providing $73 million in technical
<br>assistance to develop the site, which could offer 4,800 megawatts of
<br>power supply to South Africa and Congo by the beginning of the next decade.
<br>
<br>"The U.S. is going to be a critically important partner, not only in the
<br>sense of government participation, but there are a lot of great
<br>companies in the United States that actually make the technology that we
<br>need," Kim told the Council on Foreign Relations in New York yesterday,
<br>according to a transcript on the World Bank's website.
<br>Story: North Korea Bags $5 Million for Building Two Mugabe Statues
<br>
<br>Congo is currently considering three groups of companies from Spain,
<br>China and Korea to begin construction by October 2015. The government
<br>has said it would welcome other companies that wished to join the project.
<br>
<br>While the World Bank hasn't yet decided to support Inga 3's
<br>construction, Kim said Africa "desperately" needed the power generated
<br>from Inga, which could eventually produce as much as 40 gigawatts of
<br>energy after expansion.
<br>
<br>"It's going to be World Bank, African Development Bank, probably the
<br>government of the United States," working on the site, Kim said. He
<br>added that "the government of China has shown great interest in this
<br>particular project."
<br>
<br>"If we could get this group together, I really do think we could make it
<br>work," he said.
<br>
<br>To contact the reporter on this story: Michael J. Kavanagh in Kinshasa
<br>at <a href="mailto:mkavanagh9@bloomberg.net">mkavanagh9@bloomberg.net</a>
<br>________________________________________________
<br>
<br>You received this message as a subscriber on the list: <a href="mailto:africa@list.internationalrivers.org">africa@list.internationalrivers.org</a>
<br>
<br>To be removed from the list, please visit:
<br><a href="http://org.salsalabs.com/o/2486/unsubscribe.jsp">http://org.salsalabs.com/o/2486/unsubscribe.jsp</a>Weiqi Zhanghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16657414981487705201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5039910341338893506.post-30468555077592065192014-04-03T10:58:00.000-07:002014-04-03T11:01:58.285-07:00World Bank, U.S., China Discussing Congo’s Inga Hydropower PlantWorld Bank, U.S., China Discussing Congo's Inga Hydropower Plant
<br>By Michael J. Kavanagh, Bloomberg News, April 02, 2014
<br><a href="http://www.businessweek.com/news/2014-04-02/world-bank-u-dot-s-dot-china-discussing-congo-s-inga-hydropower-plant">www.businessweek.com/news/2014-04-02/world-bank-u-dot-s-dot-china-discussing-congo-s-inga-hydropower-plant</a>
<br>
<br>The World Bank is in "active negotiations" with the U.S. government to
<br>support the Democratic Republic of Congo's $12 billion Inga 3 hydropower
<br>project, bank President Jim Yong Kim said.
<br>
<br>The lender, based in Washington, is providing $73 million in technical
<br>assistance to develop the site, which could offer 4,800 megawatts of
<br>power supply to South Africa and Congo by the beginning of the next decade.
<br>
<br>"The U.S. is going to be a critically important partner, not only in the
<br>sense of government participation, but there are a lot of great
<br>companies in the United States that actually make the technology that we
<br>need," Kim told the Council on Foreign Relations in New York yesterday,
<br>according to a transcript on the World Bank's website.
<br>Story: North Korea Bags $5 Million for Building Two Mugabe Statues
<br>
<br>Congo is currently considering three groups of companies from Spain,
<br>China and Korea to begin construction by October 2015. The government
<br>has said it would welcome other companies that wished to join the project.
<br>
<br>While the World Bank hasn't yet decided to support Inga 3's
<br>construction, Kim said Africa "desperately" needed the power generated
<br>from Inga, which could eventually produce as much as 40 gigawatts of
<br>energy after expansion.
<br>
<br>"It's going to be World Bank, African Development Bank, probably the
<br>government of the United States," working on the site, Kim said. He
<br>added that "the government of China has shown great interest in this
<br>particular project."
<br>
<br>"If we could get this group together, I really do think we could make it
<br>work," he said.
<br>
<br>To contact the reporter on this story: Michael J. Kavanagh in Kinshasa
<br>at <a href="mailto:mkavanagh9@bloomberg.net">mkavanagh9@bloomberg.net</a>
<br>________________________________________________
<br>
<br>This is International Rivers' mailing list on China's global footprint, and particularly Chinese investment in international dam projects.
<br>
<br>You received this message as a subscriber on the list: <a href="mailto:chinaglobal@list.internationalrivers.org">chinaglobal@list.internationalrivers.org</a>
<br>
<br>To be removed from the list, please visit:
<br><a href="http://org.salsalabs.com/o/2486/unsubscribe.jsp">http://org.salsalabs.com/o/2486/unsubscribe.jsp</a>Weiqi Zhanghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16657414981487705201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5039910341338893506.post-48803888839079377482014-04-02T09:19:00.000-07:002014-04-02T09:22:32.840-07:00Uttarakhand’s Furious Himalayan Flood Could Bury India’s Hydropower Program[In-depth report on the Uttarakhand floods and their impacts on dam
<br>building on Circle of Blue, with stunning images and a video feature by
<br>SANDRP]
<br>
<br>Uttarakhand's Furious Himalayan Flood Could Bury India's Hydropower Program
<br>Circle of Blue, Wednesday, 02 April 2014 06:00
<br><a href="http://www.circleofblue.org/waternews/2014/world/uttarakhands-furious-himalayan-flood-bury-indias-hydropower-program/">www.circleofblue.org/waternews/2014/world/uttarakhands-furious-himalayan-flood-bury-indias-hydropower-program/</a>
<br>
<br>The Uttarakhand flood exceeded every previous high-end boundary of water
<br>surge, infrastructure failure, and survivability. At the Vishnuprayag
<br>Hydroelectric Project on the Alaknanda River, floodwaters surged over
<br>the 55-foot tall dam and boulders buried it in 60 feet of rubble. Click
<br>image to enlarge.
<br>By Keith Schneider, Circle of Blue
<br>
<br>SRINAGAR, Uttarakhand, India – On May 24, 2003, as part a national plan
<br>to generate more electricity from sources other than coal, Prime
<br>Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee directed India to pursue one of the most
<br>daring energy production campaigns in history.
<br>Vajpayee called on his nation of more than 1 billion people to break
<br>through corruption, bureaucracy, and its own doubts and build 162 big
<br>hydroelectric power projects by 2025. The dams and power stations would
<br>be capable of generating 50,000 megawatts of electricity, the equivalent
<br>of 50 big coal or nuclear-fired power plants.
<br>At the time, India's utility sector had the capacity to generate 108,000
<br>megawatts – one-tenth as much as the electrical sector in the United
<br>States. Some 27,000 megawatts, or a quarter of India's total energy
<br>production, came from hydropower.
<br>Vajpayee's announcement was robed in the formality and national
<br>determination comparable to U.S. President John Kennedy's 1960s plan to
<br>land a man on the moon and bring him back safely within a decade. Energy
<br>sourced from moving water, Vajpayee said, was desperately needed in a
<br>country demoralized by hourly supply disruptions, daily brownouts and
<br>regular blackouts.
<br>"Power is a critical input for any economic activity," the prime
<br>minister said. "Its sufficiency is a prerequisite for speeding up
<br>India's economic growth and improving the living standards of all our
<br>citizens. Without power, we cannot empower our people in the economic
<br>dimension of their lives. It is a major determinant of the quality of life."
<br>And just like the American space program, not much was discussed in
<br>public by the government about the extraordinary risks. Meeting the
<br>prime minister's vision would be technically challenging and extremely
<br>dangerous.
<br>Almost all of the new projects — 113 dams and power stations capable of
<br>generating 40,000 megawatts of electricity —- were planned for five
<br>Himalayan states. Of those, 33 of the new hydropower schemes were
<br>targeted for the high mountain valleys in Uttarakhand.
<br>
<br>A Himalayan state north of New Delhi that 9 million people call home,
<br>Uttarakhand shares borders with China and Nepal. The state, a little
<br>smaller than West Virginia, is rich in perpendicular slopes, ample
<br>water, turbulent rivers and a history of ecological chaos.
<br>
<br>The Mountains Respond
<br>The Himalayas are still forming, still rising — producing one of the
<br>most active earthquake zones in the world. The fierce drenching from
<br>annual summer monsoons erupt in regular flash floods that undermine the
<br>soils of vertical slopes, cause monstrous landslides, and episodically
<br>lay waste to big stretches of the region's serpentine one-way-in,
<br>one-way-out highways. In a typical year, dozens of people drown, are
<br>buried, or swept away by floods in India's Himalayan states.
<br>Hubris, Climate Change Magnifies A Flood's Rampage
<br>The Uttarakhand flood, according to the Wadia Institute for Himalayan
<br>Geology and other scientific agencies, was caused by a convergence of
<br>hydrological events, several of them linked to the region's changing
<br>climate.
<br>First was the early arrival of the annual monsoon that accelerated snow
<br>melting, produced higher than normal rainfall, and then unleashed a
<br>cloudburst that dumped at least 300 millimeters (12 inches) of rain on
<br>June 16 on the Himalayan ridges that fed the Alaknanda and Bhagirathi
<br>river basins.
<br>The second event, a direct result of the cloudburst, was the collapse of
<br>the banks that retained the waters of Chorabari Lake, a glacial lake fed
<br>by rain and snowmelt that was located at 3,960 meters (13,000 feet) and
<br>two kilometers (1.2 miles) upsteam of Kedarnath, in the Mandakini River
<br>floodplain. Chorabari Lake, 400 meters long by 200 meters wide and up to
<br>20 meters deep (1,300 feet long, 660 feet wide and 60 feet deep)
<br>released all of its water in 10 minutes.
<br>Like packs of wild dogs clamoring for blood, floodwaters tore down the
<br>steep valleys, bounded out of the river channels, and lashed at
<br>everything in their path. Kedarnath, Rambara, Gaurikund, much of
<br>Sonprayag, and other villages disappeared under the deluge of water,
<br>boulders and mud. The rivers clawed at the banks and bluffs, causing
<br>over 100 landslides that brought down or damaged more than 1,000
<br>kilometers of highways and caused an unknown number of hotels, homes,
<br>shops, and government buildings to fall into the torrent.
<br>The estimated death toll ranged from 6,000 (Government of Uttarakhand)
<br>to 30,000 (residents and the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology). The
<br>Indian Army and emergency and rescue crews transported tens of thousands
<br>of stranded people to safety, many by helicopter. Under rolling masses
<br>of clouds, it was dangerous work. Twenty rescuers died when one of the
<br>choppers crashed.
<br>The torrent produced consequences that no engineer anticipated and no
<br>Uttarakhand resident had ever seen. A joint study by the World Bank and
<br>the Asian Development Bank estimated that damage to public
<br>infrastructure — roads, water transport, buildings — amounted to nearly
<br>$700 million. There has been no formal estimate of the financial damage
<br>to the state's hydropower projects.
<br>Despite the inherent risks, India's hydro-entranced prime minister and
<br>his aides were determined to join China, Bhutan, Nepal, and Pakistan in
<br>turning the Himalayas into the Saudi Arabia of hydroelectric energy. In
<br>the decade since 2003, India's hydropower ambitions magnified: 292 big
<br>hydro projects are under construction or planned for India's Himalayan
<br>region, according to the Central Electric Authority.
<br>The most turbulent stretches of many Himalayan rivers are scheduled to
<br>support five or six new dams, one every 10 kilometers or so. That's more
<br>utility-scale installations than are planned for the world's other new
<br>hydropower production zones – the Rocky Mountains in British Columbia,
<br>the Amazon Basin, and the Andes mountains, according to assessments by
<br>power authorities in those regions.
<br>
<br>"The government wants to put dams on every river in the Himalayas," said
<br>Prakash Nautiyal, a fisheries biologist and for decades a professor of
<br>zoology at the Hemwati Nandan Bahuguna Garhwal University in this
<br>Alaknanda River city of 150,000 residents. "You know the car culture of
<br>Delhi and Mumbai? Bumper to bumper. That's what they want to do in the
<br>Himalayas with dams. Bumper to bumper."
<br>The unavoidable challenge that India's engineers and contractors
<br>recognized but largely ignored, according to a flurry of government and
<br>university studies dating to the early 1990s, was whether the truculent
<br>mountain range would accept such intensive industrial intrusion. Late
<br>last spring, at the start of the heaviest monsoon season in memory, the
<br>Himalayas answered that question.
<br>On June 16 and June 17, 2013 the mountains unleashed two days of
<br>monstrous floods that killed about 6,000 people, according to estimates
<br>from the Uttarakhand government. Survivors and researchers at the Wadia
<br>Institute for Himalayan Geology put the death toll at 30,000. Some 800
<br>battered bodies were recovered and 5,200 others were declared missing.
<br>India defends the estimated death toll of 6,000 based on the
<br>applications it reviewed and approved for compensation to families that
<br>lost loved ones.
<br>Residents of the Mandakini River Valley interviewed by Circle of Blue
<br>said the number of people who died was much higher, perhaps 30,000. That
<br>figure is supported by Kapil Kesarwani, a senior research fellow at the
<br>Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology, a prestigious government-supported
<br>research center in Dehradun, Uttarakhand's capital.
<br>The flooding wiped away at least six villages, buried dozens of others
<br>in mud, wrecked over 1,000 kilometers of highways, and dumped hundreds
<br>of buildings into the furious waters.
<br>Maharaj Pandit, a professor in the Department of Environmental Studies
<br>at the University of Delhi, and one of India's independent authorities
<br>on hydropower development, was on a field research trip in mid-June when
<br>the rains intensified along the Bhagirathi River near Gangotri, a Hindu
<br>sacred site high up in a Himalayan pass.
<br>Pandit heard the grind and crash of boulders knocking against each other
<br>in the boiling water. It was a new sound, an alarm signaling urgent
<br>danger. He gathered his team, terminated the trip, and descended as
<br>quickly as he dared out of the mountains where bridges were washing away
<br>and roads were vanishing in landslides.
<br>"I had never seen the river in such a rage," Pandit said. "The river
<br>didn't feel well that day."
<br>
<br>Flood's Effects on Dam Construction
<br>The June flood also may have drowned India's long campaign to diversify
<br>its energy production with big Himalayan hydropower projects.
<br>Circle of Blue was able to document that the flood seriously damaged at
<br>least 10 big projects in operation and under construction in
<br>Uttarakhand. Another 19 small hydropower projects that generate under 25
<br>megawatts were destroyed.
<br>The findings are based on Circle of Blue's field reporting in December
<br>and January, state and national media dispatches, independent news
<br>services, and trade journal notices. We were assisted by the South Asia
<br>Network on Dams and Rivers, a non-profit advocacy group, and reports
<br>posted on Down to Earth, an online New Delhi-based environmental news
<br>site affiliated with the Centre for Science and Environment.
<br>The Central and state government authorities, and private dam
<br>developers, have said next to nothing about the extent of the damage in
<br>news releases, on their Web sites, or in public statements. Repeated
<br>efforts by Circle of Blue to reach business executives and government
<br>regulators by email and phone calls were ignored.
<br>The most heavily damaged projects, according to our findings, include:
<br>• The 400-megawatt Vishnuprayag Hydroelectric Project, upriver from
<br>Srinagar along the Alaknanda River, was buried beneath 20 meters of
<br>rubble that also filled its water storage lake and likely wrecked the
<br>mouth of the penstock, the pipe that transports water to the powerhouse
<br>downstream.
<br>• A second dam under construction on the Mandakini River, the
<br>76-megawatt Phata-Byung Hydroelectric Project, washed away.
<br>• The 99-megawatt Singoli-Bhatwari Hydroelectric Project downstream
<br>on the Mandakini, a major tributary of the Alaknanda, was so
<br>aggressively pummeled by boulders that big chunks of concrete were
<br>gouged out of its base and the patches of steel reinforcing rods of two
<br>support towers were bent like broken fingers.
<br>• The powerhouse and turbines of the 330-megawatt Alaknanda Hydro
<br>Power Project in Srinagar were inundated with mud and silt just weeks
<br>before it was scheduled to begin operating.
<br>• A landslide blocked the end of the water discharge tunnel at the
<br>280-megawatt Dhauliganga project near the border with Nepal. The plug
<br>caused a backup that submerged the entire turbine room constructed deep
<br>inside the hill near the dam, causing at least $50 million in damage and
<br>a shutdown that has still not ended, said dam operators. (See sidebar
<br>for more damaged hydropower projects.)
<br>The Uttarakhand flood surprised India with its fury. Energy authorities
<br>in Asia and in North America have said the flood caused the most damage
<br>to a nation's hydropower infrastructure since 1975, when rains from a
<br>typhoon overwhelmed the Banqiao Dam and 61 smaller dams in central
<br>China, killing 171,000 people.
<br>In the history of energy disasters, the Uttarakhand flood struck the
<br>global hydropower industry with the same force that the reactor
<br>meltdowns at Three Mile Island (U.S. 1979), Chernobyl (Soviet Union,
<br>1986), and Fukushima (Japan, 2011) battered the nuclear power sector.
<br>
<br>Uttarakhand: India' s holy land
<br>Uttarakhand is a land of religious pilgrimage. The Ganges River, India's
<br>most sacred, forms where the Alaknanda and Bhagirathi rivers tumble off
<br>the snowy peaks of the Himalayas and meet in Devaprayag, 35 kilometers
<br>(22 miles) downriver from Srinagar, a university and tourist city of
<br>150,000 residents.
<br>Upriver, at elevations that are snow-covered and frozen most of the
<br>year, are the 1,000-year-old Badrinath and Kedarnath temples. They are
<br>situated in the headwater floodplains of the Alaknanda and Mandakini
<br>rivers. Both shrines are as holy to Hindus as the Wailing Wall is to
<br>Jews and the Dome of the Rock is to Muslims.
<br>The high mountain temples, difficult to reach on dangerous roads and
<br>open just a few months a year, serve as sentinels to the magnificence
<br>and the treachery of Uttarakhand's vertical geography.
<br>Tens of thousands of people were in the Mandakini flood plain at the
<br>height of the annual pilgrimage to Kedarnath temple. The hotels and
<br>shops in the villages leading up to the shrine were filled with Hindu
<br>pilgrims. Pilgrims also jammed Rambara, and the long footpath from that
<br>Mandakini River town to Kedarnath.
<br>In addition, some 7,000 to 10,000 workers were in the area carrying
<br>pilgrims to the shrine on their mules, serving in the restaurants and
<br>hotels, working in the hundreds of religious stalls along the way. Many
<br>of those workers were from Nepal or neighboring countries, said
<br>residents, and had no documentation.
<br>They were in the direct path of the floodwaters. The destruction
<br>unfolded quickly, and was catastrophic.
<br>Sonprayag, a tourist village just downstream from the Kedarnath shrine,
<br>was swept nearly clean away by floodwaters and boulders. Vicky Bhatt,
<br>the 22-year-old owner and manager of a guesthouse, said 500 cars were
<br>carried into the Mandakini River. At least 25 people who were hiking
<br>down from Kedarnath and crossing a hillside just upriver were buried
<br>when it slipped into the river.
<br>What's left of Sonprayag now sits directly on the Mandakini's banks. The
<br>riverbed is a new geography of immense boulders. Before the flood,
<br>Sonprayag perched on a high bluff, and the river lay so far below — 75
<br>meters (250 feet) by Bhatt's estimate — that it took half an hour to
<br>reach the river's waters by foot on a narrow and steep path.
<br>The tourist trade that supports Sonprayag has essentially dissolved to
<br>nothing. "It's going to take three, four, five years to get back to
<br>normal," Bhatt said. "We can't believe what happened here. All these
<br>stones around us. The river is right there. We're still stunned by it."
<br>Residents of the Alaknanda basin said there was a religious dimension to
<br>the June flood. The Hindu gods, they said, were angry with the tourist
<br>trade, intense and growing, in a region of such splendid spiritualism.
<br>The case for the religious connection also is strengthened, they said,
<br>by two events involving sacred shrines.
<br>North of Srinagar, the lake filling up behind the new Alaknanda
<br>hydropower dam required the owners to build a concrete platform high
<br>enough to keep Dhari, the goddess of power, dry. Dhari is named for an
<br>Alaknanda River village and is a noted Hindu shrine. On the day that
<br>Dhari was placed on the new platform, June 16, the cloudburst opened on
<br>the Himalayan ridges above the Alaknanda and Mandakini rivers, setting
<br>off the calamitous flood.
<br>The same day, the torrent of water pushed a huge boulder down the
<br>Mandakini valley toward Kedarnath. The rock, as big as a truck trailer,
<br>slipped sideways and stopped mere feet from the rear of the Kedarnath
<br>shrine. The boulder was long enough and heavy enough to serve as a
<br>floodwall, diverting the water and debris around the shrine; it saved
<br>one of Hinduism's most sacred sites and dozens of people inside who'd
<br>sought shelter.
<br>"The disaster is a costly wake-up call," said Peter Bosshard, the policy
<br>director at International Rivers, a California based non-profit research
<br>and river protection group that primarily operates in Asia, Africa, and
<br>Latin America. "It shows that nature will strike back if we disregard
<br>the ecological limits of fragile regions like the Himalayas through
<br>reckless dam building and other infrastructure development. We can only
<br>expect such disasters to happen more frequently under a changing climate."
<br>
<br>Court Intervention
<br>India's Supreme Court reached essentially the same conclusion. Last
<br>August 13, eight weeks after the flood, two Supreme Court judges, ruling
<br>in a case involving the 330-megawatt Alaknanda Hydro Power Project,
<br>issued an order that indefinitely prohibited the Central and state
<br>governments from granting any more permits for hydroelectric projects in
<br>Uttarakhand. The order essentially shut down new hydropower development
<br>in India's 27th state.
<br>"We are very much concerned about the mushrooming of a large number of
<br>hydroelectric projects in Uttarakhand and its impact on the Alaknanda
<br>and Bhagirathi river basins," wrote Justices K.S. Radhakrishnan and
<br>Dipak Misra. "Various studies also indicate that in the upper Ganga
<br>area, there are large and small hydropower projects. The cumulative
<br>impact of those project components like dams, tunnels, blasting, muck
<br>disposal, mining, deforestation, etc. on the ecosystem has yet to be
<br>scientifically examined."
<br>The Supreme Court's intervention also came with a directive to the
<br>Ministry of Environment and Forests, the principal regulatory agency, to
<br>form a special commission to study the safety and merits of continuing
<br>with constructing dams in India's most important hydropower state.
<br>The commission, appointed last year, is unlikely to issue its
<br>conclusions until after the national election results are announced in
<br>mid-May. Those findings, and their implementation, also are likely to be
<br>overseen by the National Green Tribunal, a four-year-old panel of senior
<br>jurists that rules on India's big environmental cases.
<br>In August, two weeks after the Supreme Court order, the Tribunal said it
<br>would hear a case involving flood damage that citizens in Srinagar said
<br>was amplified by the Alaknanda hydropower dam. The Tribunal also is
<br>monitoring repairs and construction at the damaged Vishnuprayag dam. The
<br>Tribunal's presence is a clear indication that its jurists will closely
<br>follow other legal and regulatory aspects of the disaster.
<br>
<br>A Long History of Water-Powered Electricity
<br>India's experience with hydroelectric energy is among the longest in the
<br>world. In 1897, just two years after the world's first hydroelectric
<br>power station opened at Niagara Falls, in the United States, British
<br>engineers built the 130-kilowatt Sidrapong Power Station near
<br>Darjeeling, in northeast India near the border with Bhutan. It was
<br>India's first water-powered electrical generating plant.
<br>In 1947, when India gained its independence, 508 megawatts of the
<br>country's 1,362 megawatts of electrical generating capacity were gained
<br>from hydropower, or 37 percent. Most of the remaining 756 megawatts of
<br>generating capacity, or 55 percent, came from coal combustion.
<br>Jawaharlal Nehru, India's prime minster from 1947 to 1964, encouraged
<br>dam construction as a symbol of modernization and rapid
<br>industrialization. The Hirakud Dam, completed in 1957 along the Mahanadi
<br>River in eastern India, has 307.5 megawatts of generating capacity and
<br>is one of the longest dams in the world.
<br>Other Damaged Dams
<br>Along with the operational hydropower projects damaged by the 2013
<br>flood, a number of big projects under construction were bullied by the
<br>furious waters, some so badly they may never be built.
<br>The 520-megawatt Tapovan-Vishnugad dam, under construction on an
<br>Alaknanda River tributary and seriously damaged last year by a flash
<br>flood, was hit again. The tunnel carrying water to the powerhouse,
<br>finished in April 2013, was washed away in June, according to a report
<br>in a hydropower trade magazine.
<br>Just upriver, the 171-megawatt Lata Tapovan project, under construction
<br>and approaching its 2017 opening, was overrun by floodwaters that
<br>damaged concrete work and forced at least a year-long delay in its
<br>commissioning. The delay could grow longer because the highway network
<br>is so broken and unstable it is unsafe to transport heavy equipment that
<br>is needed for repairs.
<br>Both of the Maneri Bhali projects on the Bhagirathi River were damaged.
<br>The 25-year-old Maneri I dam, with a 99-megwatt generating capacity, and
<br>the 304-megawatt dam that opened in 2008, were hit hard enough for walls
<br>to collapse.
<br>Heavy rains also affected dams in other regions of Uttarakhand including
<br>the Banbasa project on the Sarda River in eastern Uttrakhand near Nepal.
<br>Devandra Singh, an assistant engineer with the National Hydroelectric
<br>Power Corporation, told reporters that dam operators opened the
<br>floodgates after water upstream swelled to 544,000 cubic feet per
<br>second, higher than the previous record of 522,000 cubic feet per
<br>second. Officials said 48 people died in villages in Nepal and in Uttar
<br>Pradesh, an Indian state that shares a border with Uttarakhand. Half a
<br>million people in Uttar Pradesh also were driven from their homes by the
<br>flood.
<br>Nehru was enthralled by the 225.5-meter (740 feet) Bhakra Nangal dam in
<br>Himachal Pradesh, for decades India's tallest dam. During a visit to the
<br>dam in 1956, one of 10 he made to view construction and to dedicate the
<br>dam in 1963, Nehru declared, "Bhakra, the new temple of resurgent India,
<br>is the symbol of India's progress."
<br>Yet building dams at the pace India's government long sought proved
<br>elusive. It wasn't that India's leadership lacked resolve. In the 1970s,
<br>India established the National Hydroelectric Power Corporation to focus
<br>the national government's technical and financial attention on building
<br>hydroelectric dams. Between 1975, when the agency was founded, and 1985,
<br>water-generated electricity capacity grew to 14,460 megawatts, almost
<br>7,500 megawatts more than when the new agency was formed. Still,
<br>hydropower fell to less than 30 percent of the country's generating
<br>capacity.
<br>Not satisfied, India's energy and finance authorities approved a more
<br>aggressive hydropower development policy, approving a new Electricity
<br>Act in 1998 that led in 2003 to an updated law and Prime Minister
<br>Vajpayee's hydropower initiative. Both were established as India was
<br>opening its economy to foreign investors and as its leaders eyed the
<br>energy-sucking whirlwind in neighboring China as an economic growth
<br>model to emulate.
<br>The Central Electric Authority estimated that 50,000 new megawatts was
<br>just a third of India's potential hydropower generating capacity of
<br>150,000 megawatts, more than all but three other nations – China, Brazil
<br>and Canada.
<br>New financing, subsidies, and permitting protocols were established to
<br>encourage the construction. India's prime minister and The Ministry of
<br>Power, the energy development agency, promoted the idea that hydropower
<br>would account for 40 percent of India's total generating capacity. On
<br>paper, and in the glare of intense media attention, the development plan
<br>seemed ambitious but achievable.
<br>
<br>Uttarakhand – Land of Big Water Projects
<br>More than half of the hydropower generating capacity announced in 2003
<br>was to come from just two states. Uttarakhand, then named Uttaranchal
<br>until it became India's 27th state, was the focus of 33 projects and
<br>5,282 megawatts of generating capacity. Arunachal Pradesh, which borders
<br>China, Bhutan, and Myanmar in India's Northeast region, was set for 42
<br>projects and 27,293 megawatts.
<br>The first four years of the hydropower expansion, 2003 through 2006,
<br>went well. Generating capacity nationally jumped sharply to 34,654
<br>megawatts, an increase of 7,654 megawatts in capacity. That was close to
<br>the 11,000 megawatts of new generating capacity from coal-fired power
<br>plants during the same period.
<br>Global Confrontation Over Water and Energy
<br>Intense national programs designed to meet growing global demand for
<br>energy are creating a number of mammoth and dangerous energy production
<br>zones. As Circle of Blue and the Wilson Center have reported since 2010
<br>in our Global Choke Point Project, tapping those zones yields urgent
<br>contests over fresh water supplies, environmental and economic security,
<br>and public safety.
<br>India is a player in the swirl of these new global energy, water, and
<br>food trends. Last year, in our first reports from the Choke Point: India
<br>project, Circle of Blue described how India's policy of providing free
<br>energy and water to farmers produced massive grain surpluses that rot in
<br>storage facilities in the northwest Punjab region. Meanwhile, so much
<br>energy is wasted moving water with electric pumps that the country is
<br>unable to mine enough coal in its eastern states, causing fuel shortages
<br>in thermal electrical power industry.
<br>India's response to that is not to ask farmers to pay for water and
<br>electricity, a change that would temper demand for energy and for water,
<br>and ease food surpluses. Rather, India is building highly complex
<br>hydroelectric production facilities in the treacherous alpine valleys of
<br>the world's tallest and most perilous mountains.
<br>Circle of Blue and the Wilson Center, its Global Choke Point research
<br>partner, also have reported on the fierce global contest for energy and
<br>water in these production zones:
<br>Tar sands mining in Alberta, Canada, and fracking deep shales in the
<br>U.S. to produce new streams of oil and natural gas come with manifest
<br>evidence of serious damage to land and to water.
<br>So much oil-fueled power is needed to convert seawater to fresh water in
<br>the Arabian Gulf that several studies, including one by the Qatar
<br>Foundation, predict that desalination is a factor in the enormously
<br>unsettling economic prospect that Saudi Arabia will cease to be an oil
<br>exporter by the early 2030s.
<br>A serious contest for scarce water between livestock herders and mining
<br>companies has developed in Mongolia's energy-rich South Gobi desert.
<br>China's Yellow River Basin, a desert region that produces most of the
<br>nation's coal and a fifth of its grain, will run out of water by the
<br>early 2020s unless energy and farm production practices undergo
<br>formative changes.
<br>Australia was gripped by a 12-year drought in the Murray-Darling Basin,
<br>its primary food production region, that started in the late 1990s.
<br>While the big dry unfolded Australia installed courageous, expensive,
<br>and pioneering water conservation equipment, farm production practices,
<br>and policy designed to limit the consequences of the next big episode of
<br>water scarcity.
<br>In the United States, a severe drought in Texas prompted voters last
<br>November to approve a $2 billion bond to support water conservation and
<br>water supply measures. The federal and California state governments this
<br>year agreed to spend $2 billion in relief to aid farmers and cities
<br>affected by a three-year drought, and state lawmakers are proposing a $7
<br>billion to $9 billion bond for equipment and construction to improve how
<br>the state stores, transports, and conserves fresh water.
<br>Uttarakhand emerged as the most important state for new dams and power
<br>stations. In 2005 and 2006, three big hydropower facilities opened, with
<br>generating capacity of 1,680 megawatts, or more than a fifth of the
<br>country's new hydro capacity.
<br>But the years from 2007 to 2013 were much more difficult for India's
<br>hydroelectric construction sector. Generating capacity rose to 39,941
<br>megawatts by the end of March 2013, an increase of 5,287 megawatts in
<br>six years, or less than 1,000 megawatts of new generating capacity
<br>annually. During the same six-year period, India's overall generating
<br>capacity from utilities grew to 223,343 megawatts — a 90,000-megawatt
<br>jump, driven principally by 60,000 megawatts of new coal-fired
<br>generating capacity.
<br>The causes of the slowdown in hydropower development are numerous,
<br>according to assessments by the Central Electric Authority, the Ministry
<br>of Power, engineering studies and hydro trade association journals. The
<br>difficulty in securing financing for projects that typically range from
<br>a low end of $500 million to well over $1 billion, and to move proposals
<br>through India's suffocating permitting bureaucracy, added time and
<br>expense. The size of the projects, the extent of land needed for water
<br>storage, the numbers of people to be moved, along with the considerable
<br>harm to fisheries and local ecology, generated a fierce civic opposition
<br>movement, particularly in Uttarakhand and in Arunachal Pradesh.
<br>Then came the forbidding technical difficulties of building and
<br>operating big hydroelectric schemes in the Himalayas. They baffled
<br>engineers and managers. Constructing a big dam in the Himalayas, it
<br>turned out, was as difficult a feat of engineering, design,
<br>construction, and industrial management as exists on the planet.
<br>Flash floods wrecked construction schedules and added costs. Landslides
<br>buried equipment. It has taken years for engineers and designers to
<br>fully understand and deal with the exceptionally high concentrations of
<br>mud, silt, and grit carried by Himalayan rivers. The load of
<br>ragged-edged grains of quartz and feldspar constantly overwhelm settling
<br>basins, and chew up pipes and turbines.
<br>Stories of epic episodes of engineering and construction have become
<br>part of the Himalayan narrative. In Himachal Pradesh, west of
<br>Uttarakhand, the owners of the 1500-megawatt Nathpa Jhakri Power scheme
<br>on the Satluj River finally opened six generating turbines in 2004 after
<br>11 years of construction.
<br>The project was a study in Job-like calamity and persistence. In 1993,
<br>just as construction began, a rockslide caused by the monsoon demolished
<br>the construction site. Flash floods struck in 2000. In its first years
<br>of operation so much silt clogged the dam's power turbines that the
<br>plant was shut down for weeks at a time. New coatings on metal parts, an
<br>increase in the height of the dam, and revised operating procedures have
<br>helped since.
<br>India's power authorities and engineers insist they recognize and can
<br>manage the risks. Hydropower sector executives say opponents of dam
<br>construction are exaggerating the potential harm.
<br> "There has been considerable environmental awakening in India during
<br>the past 25 or so years," wrote Chetan Pandit, a hydropower specialist
<br>and former official in India's Central Water Commission, in an email to
<br>Circle of Blue. "We did realize that there was a need and scope to
<br>improve the performance of our river valley projects on environmental
<br>and social counts. India responded to this requirement by enacting
<br>several laws and rules that stipulated an exacting scrutiny of the
<br>project design before it was granted environmental clearance. This was a
<br>welcome move. But the downside of it was, some enterprising young people
<br>saw in this an opportunity to earn a livelihood by opposing all
<br>infrastructure, and that includes river valley projects."
<br>
<br>Warnings Ignored
<br>Concern about the safety of the new Himalayan dams didn't come just from
<br>uninformed opponents. In 1996, a report on the Himalaya's changing
<br>ecology by the Center for Science and Environment, the New Delhi-based
<br>research group, said: "The Himalayan mountains constitute an ecological
<br>system naturally primed for disaster. The deep gorges through which the
<br>Himalayan rivers flow convey the impression that the Himalayan valleys
<br>would never face floods. Yet these very channels often fail to contain
<br>the fury of disastrous floods. Among the most affected valleys are the
<br>Alaknanda and Bhagirathi valleys of the Garhwal Himalaya."
<br>In 2007, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
<br>noted that the Himalayas were among the regions most affected by the
<br>warming atmosphere, a point supported two years later by India's
<br>Ministry of Environment and Forests.
<br>A 2009 report on the risk of floods in Uttarakhand by India's
<br>Comptroller and Auditor General warned that "audit scrutiny of project
<br>records revealed that no specific measures had been planned/designed in
<br>any project to cope with the risk of flash floods. The adverse
<br>consequences of such floods are acute as they cannot only damage the
<br>project structures, but can cause loss of life in low-lying downstream
<br>areas."
<br>In 2012, a study commissioned by the Ministry of Environment and Forests
<br>recommended that 24 of 39 hydropower projects proposed for Uttarakhand
<br>be suspended because of the havoc they would cause for fisheries, and
<br>the region's environment. The Ministry did not act on the recommendation.
<br>
<br>Run-of-River Water Diversion Projects
<br>Most, but not all of the new dams built and planned in Uttarakhand, are
<br>compact in design and meant to be built in high mountain locations. They
<br>are based on an old and familiar technology called "run-of-river."
<br>In such projects, a dam – known in India as a barrage – diverts a
<br>portion of a river's flow to a headpond created by the dam. A canal or
<br>pipe (known as a head race tunnel) directs the stored water through
<br>mountains to turbines in the powerhouse, which is often many kilometers
<br>downstream and much lower in elevation. The kinetic energy that develops
<br>from the falling water and the pressure in the pipe turns turbines and
<br>produces substantial energy. The water then flows back to the river.
<br>The commission appointed by the Ministry of Environment and Forests was
<br>directed by the Supreme Court to study whether the run-of-river projects
<br>amplified the flood's damage, as critics of Himalayan dams assert. The
<br>blasting associated with building dams and the long water transport
<br>tunnels, say residents interviewed by Circle of Blue, caused cracks in
<br>the foundations of their homes and destabilized already unstable
<br>hillsides. Indian environmental groups say that the flood scoured
<br>riverbanks where dam construction companies stored huge piles of dirt,
<br>mud, and stones – the spoils of excavation. The National Green Tribunal
<br>is reviewing whether flood damage in Srinagar was heightened by spoils
<br>piles that washed downriver from the Alaknanda hydropower station.
<br>That same year, Uttarakhand's own Disaster Management Department
<br>finished a report that documented the causes and aftermath of a flash
<br>flood in the upper reaches of the Bhagirathi River. The disaster, on
<br>August 3-4, 2012, was a virtual dress rehearsal for the much bigger
<br>flood 10 months later.
<br>Like the 2013 flood, the Bhagirathi flood was triggered by a big monsoon
<br>cloudburst. The raging waters and landslides killed 35 people. The
<br>highway and mountain road network in the Bhagirathi basin was heavily
<br>damaged and thousands of people were stranded for weeks.
<br>The authors of the government report found "widespread devastation in
<br>the district and even the district headquarters was not spared by the
<br>fury of nature. Heavy precipitation and ensuing flash flood resulted in
<br>washing off of a number of vehicular and pedestrian bridges."
<br>No official heed was paid to these and other studies that clarified
<br>hazards from floods and landslides. Instead, the Central Government and
<br>Uttarakhand authorities ardently pursued construction of big dams with
<br>generating capacity above 25 megawatts, and of many more small dams that
<br>generated less than 25 megawatts.
<br>In 2008, the 304-megawatt Maneri Bhalli II project opened on the
<br>Bhagarithi River, more than halfway up the turbulent course to its
<br>source in the Himalayas.
<br>In 2012, the 400-megawatt Koteshwar project, featuring a 97-meter tall
<br>(318 feet) concrete dam, opened on the Bhagarithi River, 22 kilometers
<br>(14 miles) downstream from the 1,000-megawatt Tehri Dam, which opened in
<br>2006 and, at 260 meters (855 feet), is India's tallest dam.
<br>Of the 7,200 megawatts of new hydro generating capacity that India
<br>developed from 2006 to 2013, 2,384 megawatts was opened in Uttarakhand,
<br>or 32 percent. Of the 21 big hydropower stations commissioned in India
<br>since 2006, five opened in Uttarakhand. A sixth big project, the
<br>330-megawatt Alaknanda Hydro Power Project here opened on March 5, 2014,
<br>six months after its scheduled start. The June 2013 flood inundated its
<br>power station and jammed the turbines with muck.
<br>Uttarakhand also is the site of India's most aggressive plan for future
<br>hydropower development. Five other big dams and 35 projects fewer than
<br>25 megawatts each are under construction. If completed, they'll add
<br>1,866 megawatts of capacity from large dams, and 180 megawatts from
<br>small projects. Moreover, India's newest Five-Year plan (2012 – 2017)
<br>for energy development urges Uttarakhand to build 24 more big dams by
<br>2017 to generate 6,858 megawatts of electricity.
<br>In short, before the flood, Uttarakhand's hydroelectric development
<br>program was rivaled in Asia only by China's Himalayan provinces.
<br>
<br>Whether that remains the state of hydro affairs is not at all secure.
<br>There are five big dams under construction in Uttarakhand. It's unclear
<br>if those facilities will be commissioned. A storm of bureaucratic
<br>decision making, financial shortfalls, engineering challenges, and the
<br>Supreme Court's expert commission findings can be drawn into a
<br>convincing case that India won't meet its ambitious timeline in
<br>Uttarakhand, or in the other Himalayan states.
<br>"The Supreme Court of India ordered the Ministry of Environment and
<br>Forests to constitute an expert committee to re-examine certain
<br>environmental aspects of the hydro power projects in Uttarakhand,
<br>including to examine whether the hydro power projects in any way
<br>contributed to the floods," said Chetan Pandit in an email. "Pending the
<br>report by this committee, the court has put a ban on giving further
<br>environmental clearances, which has affected 24 ongoing projects.
<br>Whether these projects will survive, or whether these will be
<br>terminated, will depend to a great extent on the report this committee
<br>submits."
<br>The Supreme Court's intervention exemplifies the intensifying and
<br>conflicting response to the Uttarakhand disaster by India's political
<br>infrastructure. On January 31, 2014, Uttarakhand Chief Minister Vijay
<br>Bahugunah resigned at the insistence of his Congress Party leadership,
<br>who said his inept management of the rescue and relief operations was
<br>unacceptable.
<br>A month before, in December 2013, Jayanthi Natarajan resigned under
<br>pressure as head of the Ministry of Environment and Forests. India's
<br>senior leadership, according to press accounts, were dismayed by the
<br>slow pace for reviewing and approving permits for big industrial
<br>projects, including for hydroelectric schemes. She was replaced by
<br>Veerappa Moily, a senior leader of the Oil and Petroleum Ministry, and a
<br>proponent of hydroelectric development.
<br>In interviews, high government officials said they anticipated that
<br>neither the Uttarakhand disaster, nor the findings of the Ministry of
<br>Environment and Forests study commission, would significantly alter
<br>India's strategy of aggressive Himalayan hydropower development. H.L.
<br>Bajaj, the former chairman of the Central Electric Authority, said the
<br>risks of India's hydropower strategy are worth the gain of securing more
<br>electricity. "Perhaps we will make adjustments to designing hydro
<br>schemes," Bajaj said in an interview in his New Delhi office. "I don't
<br>foresee that India will stop building these projects."
<br>Ram Prasad Lal, a director in the India Meteorological Department,
<br>asserted that until the June flood — what he called a "100-year event" —
<br>hydro schemes had proved resilient to heavy Himalayan rainfall.
<br>Opponents to Himalayan hydropower dams questioned that view. They said
<br>that the numbers of dams being washed out of high Himalayan valleys is
<br>increasing. Floods in Nepal in 1981 and 1985 destroyed new hydroelectric
<br>projects. Two dams were lost in a 1982 flood in Bhutan. Two more dams
<br>washed away in Arunachal Pradesh in the last decade, according to Partha
<br>Jyoti Das, programme head at Aaaranyak, a science research organization
<br>in Guwahati, and co-author of an influential report on the hazards of
<br>Himalayan hydropower projects. "It's becoming more common in this
<br>region. People just don't hear about these disasters," said Das.
<br>Nine months after the Uttarakhand disaster, India's regulatory and power
<br>development agencies ardently pursue construction, permits, and
<br>financing for more big hydro projects in four other Himalayan states,
<br>and for at least two projects in Bhutan. One hydro scheme under
<br>construction since 2007, the 330-megawatt Kishanganga Hydroelectric
<br>Project on the Kishanganga River in Jammu and Kashmir, prompted a
<br>dispute with Pakistan, which is concerned about the water diverted from
<br>the river for generating power.
<br>Pakistan brought a case to the Hague's Permanent Court of Arbitration,
<br>which ruled last year that India was entitled to just a minimal flow for
<br>electricity. How that ruling affects India's relationship with Pakistan,
<br>or the generating capacity of a project due to be completed in 2016, is
<br>a new facet of the ecological and diplomatic tumult India's hydropower
<br>strategy is now generating.
<br>
<br>More Seasons of Menace
<br>In December and January, the dry season in Uttarakhand, the Alaknanda
<br>and Mandakini Rivers are clear and blue with no angry crest at all. Yet
<br>both rivers, and several more affected by the June flood, reflect the
<br>grimness of what happened, and the strain of what could easily happen
<br>again later this year.
<br>The road transport network is not fully repaired. Transportation is so
<br>difficult, newspapers reported in February, that 1,200 tons of food
<br>could not be distributed and rotted in place. Hundreds of people are
<br>homeless.
<br>The gathering danger is not close to being lifted from Uttarakhand's
<br>magnificent and hardened Himalayan valleys. So much silt and mud and
<br>boulders washed off the hillsides during the June 2013 flood that they
<br>filled the riverbeds. The rivers of the Alaknanda and Bhaghirati basin
<br>run now on new bottoms that are 5 to 35 meters higher than they were
<br>before the flood, according to residents and the Geological Survey of India.
<br>That means that unless rubble is removed, which amounts to a monumental
<br>and costly excavation project that has not started, the approaching 2014
<br>monsoon this summer will easily overflow river banks and could cause
<br>more terrible flood damage to dams and to communities. The Himalayas,
<br>like a daredevil avenger, is exacting its vengeance with lingering
<br>seasons of menace.
<br>________________________________________________
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<br>By Michael Peel in Paunglaung
<br>Financial Times March 21, 2014
<br><a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/edc7a794-aff1-11e3-b0d0-00144feab7de.html?siteedition=intl#axzz2wdKPWI4H">www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/edc7a794-aff1-11e3-b0d0-00144feab7de.html?siteedition=intl#axzz2wdKPWI4H</a>
<br>
<br>The looming flood in Myanmar's Paunglaung river valley has forced
<br>thousands of residents out to higher ground, leaving behind deserted
<br>bamboo buildings where the only sign of life is the haunting toll of
<br>cowbells.
<br>
<br>A Chinese-backed dam downstream is due within months to shut its gates
<br>and start submerging more than 20 villages here, in a project that will
<br>power Myanmar's purpose-built capital city – and add to the dispute over
<br>the fast-opening nation's future.
<br>
<br>"We have never felt like this before," said Ma Khin Oo Wai, 24, whose
<br>family had to leave their rice farm and are now making a living weaving
<br>baskets and gathering wood in a new settlement up in the hills. "I don't
<br>know what effect this will have on the country – but for our village
<br>this is a serious setback."
<br>
<br>Opponents of the Upper Paunglaung development and dozens of other
<br>planned dams scattered around Myanmar claim the damage will be too great
<br>and the benefits too small from this energy bonanza at one of Asia's
<br>richest hydroelectric frontiers. However, supporters say the dams offer
<br>an unpalatable but unavoidable answer to electricity shortages that
<br>plague citizens and curb the ambitions of a nation emerging from decades
<br>of insular military dictatorship.
<br>
<br>"The economic development of this country is going to come at a huge
<br>social and environmental cost," said Richard Horsey, an independent
<br>Yangon-based analyst. "It's easy and nice to say these dams are bad,
<br>which they are – but, at a certain point, the alternatives may be worse."
<br>
<br>The Upper Paunglaung dam is part of the three-year-old quasi-civilian
<br>government's strategy to focus on the country's little-exploited
<br>estimated 100,000 megawatt hydroelectric potential, which is roughly
<br>equivalent to the installed electricity capacity of the UK. Myanmar's
<br>great waterways – including the Irrawaddy and Salween rivers – are seen
<br>as a way to bridge a power gap that cripples companies with power losses
<br>and has left more than four in five rural people without network
<br>electricity, according to the Asian Development Bank.
<br>
<br>But the plan has stuttered forward so far, with some projects delayed or
<br>cast into doubt because they are in areas of conflict between the
<br>government and ethnic militias. Many of the sites are shut off in
<br>security zones guarded by a military put on still higher alert by
<br>incidents such as a mysterious bomb attack in December that killed three
<br>people not far from the planned Kunlong dam.
<br>
<br>Other hydroelectric projects are provoking protest because some of their
<br>production is likely to be sent to energy-hungry neighbours such as
<br>Thailand and, especially, China. In a case that resonated nationwide,
<br>the Myanmar government responded to demonstrations in 2011 by
<br>indefinitely suspending work on the Myitsone dam in the far north of the
<br>country, whose contractors included the state China Power Investment
<br>Corporation.
<br>
<br>"People in other regions protest against these projects and they are
<br>postponed or cancelled," U Kyaw Mint, 49, a village head in the
<br>Paunglaung river community of Khan Hla, or "Good Fortune" noted
<br>wistfully. "But we say nothing and it goes ahead."
<br>
<br>Upper Paunglaung's 140MW generating capacity is tiny compared with some
<br>proposed dams – such as the towering 7,100MW Tasang – but the project
<br>foreshadows some bigger brewing battles. Built by a consortium including
<br>China's Yunnan Machinery Equipment Import & Export Company and AF Group
<br>of Switzerland, it is the second in a pair of dams in an area of
<br>spectacular beauty in the hinterland of the wide but still near-deserted
<br>highways of Naypyidaw, capital since 2005.
<br>
<br>The dam is a shock to local people who fish in the gently rippling
<br>Paunglaung river or farm in the lee of the hills ripe with stories of
<br>animist spirits, such as the region's fabled green ghosts. Relocated
<br>farmers say the hillside areas they now till are much less accessible
<br>and fertile than their former valley paddies, causing food shortages
<br>they fear will worsen.
<br>
<br>"I do not like that situation, as we will become bandits among us,"
<br>lamented U Aye Maung, 59, who said he only had 40 bags of rice in store
<br>for this year, barely half what his family needed. "Sometimes I foresee
<br>that one house will steal from another – and I will also steal from
<br>others, and we will hit each other with sticks and kill each other with
<br>swords."
<br>
<br>Villagers still nervous of criticising government after generations of
<br>repression say they have been given some compensation, new land and a
<br>water supply piped down from the mountains, but still have no network
<br>electricity – and have access only to a basic school and no hospital.
<br>
<br>"Government is like our father, and we can't go against our father,"
<br>confided one local man, tacitly referencing the historic intimidation
<br>and rights abuses locals and activists say took place after the then
<br>military junta launched the Paunglaung project a decade ago. "But we
<br>pray that maybe there are technical problems with this project, so that
<br>the dam breaks."
<br>
<br>Myanmar government officials point to the money and services already
<br>delivered to the Paunglaung river communities and say more will follow.
<br>The dam companies did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
<br>
<br>For now, villagers in the Paunglaung area are waiting for the waters –
<br>and wondering just what they will get back for a sacrifice that will be
<br>demanded from more of their fellow citizens as their country changes.
<br>
<br>"We heard that they will provide us electricity, but that will be the
<br>only benefit for the village." said Moe Aung, 18, as he gathered with
<br>friends clad in Arsenal, Liverpool and Barcelona shirts for a
<br>valedictory football match on a pitch they have played on since
<br>childhood. "Apart from that, the rest will be negative".
<br>________________________________________________
<br>
<br>This is International Rivers' mailing list on China's global footprint, and particularly Chinese investment in international dam projects.
<br>
<br>You received this message as a subscriber on the list: <a href="mailto:chinaglobal@list.internationalrivers.org">chinaglobal@list.internationalrivers.org</a>
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<br><a href="http://org.salsalabs.com/o/2486/unsubscribe.jsp">http://org.salsalabs.com/o/2486/unsubscribe.jsp</a>Weiqi Zhanghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16657414981487705201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5039910341338893506.post-76844993428394973182014-03-21T09:26:00.000-07:002014-03-21T09:27:31.359-07:00China rivers at the brink of collapseChina rivers at the brink of collapse
<br>CGIAR Agriculture and Ecosystems Blog, March 21, 2014
<br>by Peter Bosshard
<br><a href="http://wle.cgiar.org/blogs/2014/03/21/china-rivers-brink-collapse/">http://wle.cgiar.org/blogs/2014/03/21/china-rivers-brink-collapse/</a>
<br>
<br>China's rulers have traditionally derived their legitimacy from
<br>controlling water. The country ranks only sixth in terms of annual river
<br>runoff, but counts half the planet's large dams within its borders. A
<br>new report warns that dam building has brought China's river ecosystems
<br>to the point of collapse.
<br>
<br>Since the 1950s, China has dammed, straightened, diverted and polluted
<br>its rivers in a rapid quest for industrialization. Many of these
<br>projects had disastrous environmental, social and economic impacts. The
<br>Sanmenxia Dam on the Yellow River for example flooded 660 square
<br>kilometers of fertile land and displaced 410,000 people. Yet because it
<br>silted up rapidly the project only generates power at one sixth of its
<br>projected capacity.
<br>
<br>In the new millennium, the Chinese government realized that its ruthless
<br>dam building program threatened to undermine the country's long term
<br>prosperity and stability. In 2004, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao suspended
<br>dam construction on the Nu (Salween) and the Jinsha (upper Yangtze)
<br>rivers, including a project on the magnificent Tiger Leaping Gorge. The
<br>government created fisheries reserves and strengthened environmental
<br>guidelines. In 2011, it even acknowledged the "urgent environmental
<br>problems" of Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River, the world's largest
<br>hydropower project.
<br>
<br>The growing climate crisis ended the period of relative caution in
<br>building dams. At the climate summit of Copenhagen in 2009, the Chinese
<br>government committed to reduce the carbon intensity of its economy by
<br>40-45% by 2020. As a consequence, the government launched a relentless
<br>new dam building effort under its 12th Five-Year-Plan (2011-15).
<br>
<br>The current plan commits to approving 160 megawatts of new hydropower
<br>capacity by 2015 - more than any other country has built in its entire
<br>history. It prioritizes 50 large hydropower plants on the Jinsha (upper
<br>Yangtze), Yalong, Dadu, Lancang (upper Mekong), Yarlung Tsangpo
<br>(Brahmaputra) and upper Yellow River. The plan also authorizes the
<br>construction of five of the 13 dams on the Nu (Salween) River which the
<br>government had stopped in 2004.
<br>
<br>Alarmed by the pace of renewed dam building, experts from Chinese
<br>environmental organizations have come together to prepare what they call
<br>the "last report" on China's rivers. The report, which was completed in
<br>February 2014, highlights four main problems with the current wave of
<br>hydropower development:
<br>
<br>. Dams are seriously degrading China's freshwater ecosystems. They
<br>are drying up rivers and lakes, inundate fertile floodplains, and
<br>compromise the capacity of rivers to clean themselves. As a result, the
<br>Three Gorges and other reservoirs have been turned into waste dumps, at
<br>times exploding in toxic algae blooms. The Chinese river dolphin, which
<br>ploughed the waters of the Yangtze for 20 million years, has become
<br>extinct, and other freshwater species are under threat. Fish sanctuaries
<br>created to mitigate the impacts of dam building exist on paper only, or
<br>have been curtailed to allow space for more dams.
<br>
<br>. Dams impoverish poor communities further. According to former Prime
<br>Minister Wen Jiabao, dam building has displaced 23 million people in
<br>China. Displaced populations are frequently cheated and bullied by
<br>corrupt local officials, and the promised jobs or replacement lands
<br>often don't materialize. Land conflicts have become the primary cause of
<br>social unrest in China. As dam building moves upstream into mountain
<br>areas, ethnic minorities are particularly affected by displacement.
<br>
<br>. Reservoirs are destabilizing geologically fragile river valleys,
<br>create frequent landslides, and compound earthquake risks. Scientists
<br>suggest that the Zipingpu Dam in Sichuan may have triggered the Wenchuan
<br>earthquake, which killed at least 69,000 people in May 2008. Dam
<br>cascades in the seismically active valleys of southwest China are a
<br>particular concern for triggering and being impacted by earthquakes.
<br>
<br>. The decision-making process is in disarray, and government
<br>regulations are no match for the new dam building rush. Integrated river
<br>basin plans and environmental impact assessments are almost always
<br>carried out after dam construction starts. Large projects such as the
<br>Xiluodu and Xiangjiaba dams even began their construction phase before
<br>they received their final approval. In the face of such abuses, no
<br>channels for effective public consultation and participation exist.
<br>
<br>The authors of the new report point out that China's energy intensity is
<br>7 times higher than Japan's and 2.8 higher than India's. Energy
<br>intensive and polluting industries continue to suffer from
<br>over-capacity. A less energy-intensive development path will be required
<br>to relief the pressure on China's ecosystems. In the meantime, the
<br>authors propose a system of "ecological redlines" that could protect
<br>critical ecosystems from being dammed.
<br>
<br>According to the first national water census carried out in 2013, China
<br>lost 28,000 of its estimated 50,000 rivers within a few decades. The
<br>"speed of current hydropower dam construction", the authors of the new
<br>report warn, "will bring unexpected, irreversible and unbearable
<br>consequences" to the country's remaining rivers. Unless the government
<br>takes urgent action, the new report may become the epitaph for China's
<br>rivers.
<br>
<br>About the Author: Peter Bosshard is the Policy Director of International
<br>Rivers.
<br>
<br>This blog post is featured alongside responses to the question "Should
<br>we build more large dams" as part of a series of responses for World
<br>Water Day 2014 at
<br><a href="http://wle.cgiar.org/blogs/2014/03/21/asked-answered-build-large-dams/">http://wle.cgiar.org/blogs/2014/03/21/asked-answered-build-large-dams/</a>.
<br>The new China rivers report is available at
<br><a href="http://www.internationalrivers.org/node/8262">www.internationalrivers.org/node/8262</a>.
<br>________________________________________________
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<br>Megadams: Battle on the Brahmaputra
<br><a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-26663820">www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-26663820</a>
<br>
<br>China and India have their eye on the energy potential of the vast
<br>Brahmaputra river. Will a new wave of "megadams" bring power to the
<br>people - or put millions at risk? Navin Singh Khadka reports from Assam,
<br>India.
<br>
<br>On the banks of the Brahmaputra it is hard to get a sense of where the
<br>river starts and ends. It begins far away as a Tibetan mountain stream.
<br>On the floodplains of Assam, though, its waters spread as far as the eye
<br>can see, merging with the horizon and the sky.
<br>
<br> From here it continues through north-eastern India into Bangladesh,
<br>where it joins with the Ganges to form a mighty river delta.
<br>
<br>For centuries the Brahmaputra has nourished the land, and fed and
<br>watered the people on its banks.
<br>
<br>Today, though, India and China's growing economies mean the river is
<br>increasingly seen as a source of energy. Both countries are planning
<br>major dams on long stretches of the river.
<br>
<br>In Assam the plans are being greeted with scepticism and some fear.
<br>
<br>The fear is that dams upstream could give China great power over their
<br>lives. And many in Assam worry whether China has honourable intentions.
<br>
<br>After a landslide in China in 2000, the river was blocked for several
<br>days, unknown to those downstream.
<br>
<br>When the water forced its way past the blockage Assam faced an oncoming
<br>torrent. There was no advance warning. There are concerns this could
<br>happen more frequently.
<br>
<br>Some also believe that China may divert water to its parched north - as
<br>it has done with other southern rivers.
<br>
<br>India's central government says China has given them assurances about
<br>the new Tibetan dams.
<br>
<br>"Our foreign ministry has checked with China and we have been told that
<br>the flow will not be affected, and we will make sure that the people's
<br>lives are not affected by the dams," Paban Singh Ghatowar, minister for
<br>the development of north-eastern India, told the BBC.
<br>
<br>Beijing says the dams it is building on the Tibetan stretch of the river
<br>will ease power shortages for people in that region.
<br>
<br>"All new projects will go through scientific planning and feasibility
<br>studies and the impact to both upstream and downstream will be fully
<br>considered," China's foreign ministry told the BBC.
<br>
<br>It said three new dams at Dagu, Jiacha, and Jeixu were small-scale
<br>projects: "They will not affect flood control or the ecological
<br>environment of downstream areas," the foreign ministry said.
<br>
<br>Despite the statements, there is no official water-sharing deal between
<br>India and China - just an agreement to share monsoon flood data.
<br>
<br>Experts and interest groups remain as sceptical as local residents.
<br>
<br>"Rivers unite us, but dams divide us," says Peter Bosshard, of the
<br>International Rivers Network.
<br>
<br>He criticises India for ignoring the rights of Bangladesh even as it
<br>deals with China's claim on the river.
<br>
<br>"By engaging in a race to dam the Brahmaputra as quickly as possible,
<br>China and India will cause cumulative environmental impacts beyond the
<br>limits of the river's ecosystem, and will threaten the livelihoods of
<br>more than 100 million people who depend on the river."
<br>
<br>It is hard to know where the truth lies. The dams are hidden from view,
<br>on remote valleys and in deep mountain gorges. It is there that the
<br>never-ending tension between politics, development and environment is
<br>now being played out.
<br>
<br>"Start Quote:
<br> By engaging in a race to dam the Brahmaputra as quickly as possible,
<br>China and India will cause cumulative environmental impacts beyond the
<br>limits of the river's ecosystem" Peter Bosshard, International Rivers
<br>Network
<br>________________________________________________
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