China has now made a super dam, the Great Bend dam, a part of its official planning. This issue affects a lot of countries downstream, including India, which is directly affected. The Great Bend dam will impact the flow of the Brahmaputra River, which supplies 30% of India’s water. Bangladesh and other nations using Himalayan river systems will also be affected.
China is planning to phase out coal, its main energy source, by 2060. Hydro is China’s second-biggest energy source, and the logic of more hydro power is easy to understand. China’s pollution is notorious, and dangerous. Better options are definitely needed, and soon.
Construction problems, and plenty of them
The Great Bend dam, if built, would dwarf even the Three Gorges dam. It could do a lot of ecological damage in a very diverse environment, and also affect Tibetan sacred sites.
There’s much more to this issue. Simply building on such a scale in such an inaccessible area poses real problems. Construction is high-risk, with a lot of avalanches and very difficult terrain to manage to even bring in construction teams and materials.
Cost may not be a major consideration – yet – but cost overruns and issues with time frames are inevitable. The degree of difficulty is 10/10. There are no easy ways to build this dam.
The cost base cannot be taken for granted. Should construction fail, China could be left with an expensive, dysfunctional, disaster and no real fixes for the problems.
Geopolitical problems, and many of them
The huge issue here is how the dam would affect countries downstream. China would effectively be controlling the flow of water for these countries. The already less-than-blissful India/China relationship could be a flashpoint easily enough.
This is where the “weaponization” of the dam is a focal point outside China. Simply releasing water downstream could cause floods. Withholding water could cause severe shortages. These arguments are quite valid, and likely to be very acrimonious.
A less obvious problem could be China’s very fractious relationship with most of the world and dam security. This dam, if built, would be a primary target for sabotage or destruction in any real conflict. Exactly how you secure a gigantic area like this against attack is debatable, to put it mildly. The systems running it would inevitably be subject to hacking and cyberattacks.
Climate, melts and big dams – A lethal mix?
The third, potentially fatal issue for the Great Bend dam is climate. Seasonal melts around the world provide a lot of water. Recently Himalayan glacier melts have been accelerating, meaning the volume of snow and ice is decreasing, and rapidly.
This could mean that the Great Bend dam may not be able to deliver the volumes of water projected. This would be a regional disaster anyway, but, it’d make the dam much less cost-efficient. The dam would be obstructing downstream flow and unable to operate at anything like capacity.
The Great Bend dam is a very big project. If it goes wrong, the entire project fails. The risks are too many and too dangerous.
There is an alternative – Build a network of many much smaller dams around the river systems. Avoid all the risks. These smaller dams can operate safely, at far lower cost, and generate a lot of power without major hazards and severe disruptions.
Let’s hope this doesn’t go wrong. If it does, it will be a cataclysmic disaster for more than China.
