China plans dam near India that could be world’s biggest

CHINA is pressing ahead with plans to construct a mega-dam near its contested border with India, a colossal undertaking that could generate three times as much power as the Three Gorges Dam.

The Chinese government approved the construction of “a hydropower project” in the lower reaches of the Yarlung Tsangpo river in Tibet, the official Xinhua News Agency reported, without elaborating.

Previous reports indicated the dam would be the world’s biggest and require one trillion yuan (S$186 billion) of investment – making it one of the costliest infrastructure projects ever and likely a huge boon to Beijing’s efforts to revive economic growth.

The dam could become a source of tension between China and India, as the Yarlung Tsangpo runs through the contested Arunachal Pradesh area and feeds into one of India’s major rivers. Bilateral ties have just stabilised after a four-year stalemate over a June 2020 border clash that killed some 20 Indian and at least four Chinese.

The project would take at least a decade to build and require connecting to the grid further east as there’s “zero need” for this sort of energy supply in Tibet, said David Fishman, a Shanghai-based senior manager at the Lantau Group, an energy consulting firm.

“It’s a massive engineering undertaking. The river itself has excellent hydropower resources,” he added. “Everybody downstream is going to be concerned about what it means if water flow is reduced. I know India is very anxious about it.”

India’s Ministry of External Affairs declined to comment when contacted for further information.

China’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement to Bloomberg News that Beijing had “spent decades studying the development of hydropower project in the lower reaches of Yarlung Tsangpo river”, and pledged to put in place measures to ensure safety and environmental protection.

“There won’t be adverse impact to the downstream,” it added, noting China had cooperated with downstream countries on sharing hydrological data, disaster prevention and emergency response. “China will continue to maintain communication with downstream countries through existing channels,” the ministry said.

A colossal China-run dam on India’s doorstep would give Beijing influence over water flow into India, something leaders could use as leverage in times of political tensions. The two nations set up an exchange mechanism to manage such issues in 2006, and held a virtual meeting as recently as May 2022, according to China’s Ministry of Water Resources.

Power pivot

Hydro is the second largest source of power generation in China, making up nearly 14 per cent of the nation’s mix last year, according to data from BloombergNEF. But it’s growing at a slower pace than other power types. Global warming has extended droughts in China and unexpectedly cut hydropower output, leading to power crunches in water-rich provinces such as Sichuan and Yunnan.

Analysts earlier saw damming the Yarlung Tsangpo as unlikely. Getting materials and workers to such a remote site would be enormously costly, as would stringing the power lines needed to get the electricity to market.

Despite that, the government kept the door open. In 2020, a state media report cited the head of government-owned Power Construction Corporation of China saying the lower reaches of the river featured a huge gorge with potential for 70 gigawatt electricity generation capacity – more than triple that of Three Gorges Dam, which is the world’s largest.

Environmentalists in China have long worried about the irreversible impact of dam constructions in the gorge, home to a national natural reserve declared in 2000 and one of the country’s top biodiversity hotspots.

Beijing appears aware of the sensitivities. An article from 2020 asking whether a hydro project on the river – known as the Brahmaputra in India – would wipe out Tibet’s last tigers was censored on messaging platform WeChat. By Friday, that link returned the message: “The content violated rules and cannot be seen.” BLOOMBERG