Construction on China's Three Gorges Dam is set to finish next
week. Environmentalists say the lessons about the environmental
consequences of the world's largest hydropower project have yet to be learned.
 Water of the Yangtze River rush out from the
Three Gorges Dam in this October 2005 file picture. The dam, the world's
largest hydroelectric power project, will be completed in May this year,
nine months ahead of schedule, state media
reported.[AFP] |
With the last of the concrete
being poured nearly a decade after China stemmed the flow of the Yangtze River
to begin work, environmentalists say it should provide a cautionary tale to an
energy-hungry government pushing similar hydropower dam projects.
China says the Three Gorges will tame flooding on the mighty Yangtze, whose
waters have claimed 300,000 lives in the 20th century, fuel industrial growth in
the area and improve shipping -- as well as having a generating capacity of 18
gigawatts when it is complete in 2009.
"If we look at the four purposes, only the first has been realized -- it can
produce power," said Dai Qing, China's most outspoken opponent of the Three
Gorges.
"But compared to other methods of generating power that electricity is much
more expensive," she told Reuters.
The dam started generating power in mid-2003 and will have 26 turbines when
it reaches full capacity in 2009.
The dam's price tag, estimated at $10.8 billion in 1993, is expected to reach
$25 billion when completed.
How the costs of the power it generates are calculated is no academic
question.
It cuts to the heart of the compromises facing China, which relies on
sulphur-belching coal for about 70 percent of its energy, as it seeks less
polluting but affordable sources of power to fuel an economic growth of more
than 10 percent a year.
ENVIRONMENTAL COSTS
On construction costs alone, analysts say Three Gorges power is competitively
priced.
But its critics argue that with the need to resettle about 1.3 million people
flooded out of their homes, and environmental impacts of erosion, sediment
build-up and the tons of sewage flowing into the dam's reservoir each year, the
true costs are much higher.
And with China's total generating capacity about 508 GW by the end of 2005
and another 75 GW to be added this year, the dam's 18 GW will not have the same
impact it would have when the project was approved in 1992.
"When it was approved, nobody in their right mind would have thought that
China would be adding the equivalent of the capacity of the whole of the UK in
one year," said Joseph Jacobelli, an analyst at Merrill Lynch in Hong Kong.
"Any additional capacity helps, but in the global scheme of things the Three
Gorges is quite small."
With the end of the project that has been debated in China for decades in
sight, critics say opposition is still relevant because of the effect on future
dam-building.
More than a dozen hydropower projects for the upper reaches of the Yangtze
have been proposed, including one to dam the Tiger Leaping Gorge, a tourist
mecca in the Tibetan foothills of China's southwestern province of Yunnan.
Debate is also raging over plans to harness Yunnan's Nu River with a chain of
up to 13 hydropower stations, a project that would take a decade to build and
generate more power than the Three Gorges.
Since the Three Gorges was approved there is now environmental impact
legislation in China, but critics such as Dai Qing say the problem is that there
is a lack of public participation and open debate about such massive projects.
Environmental impact studies of the Nu River proposal have been done, but not
publicly released.
"I think the government can really only proceed with more dams if they can
maintain a fiction that Three Gorges makes sense," said Patricia Adams,
executive-director of Probe International, a Canadian environmental think-tank.
"There are better methods of electricity production being locked out in order
to protect a bigger project like the Three Gorges," she
said.