China has proposed a titanic challenge in the heart of the Himalayas: the construction of the Motuo megadam on the Yarlung Tsangpo River, which aspires to become the largest hydroelectric dam in the world. With this project, the Asian country seeks to far surpass the legendary Three Gorges Dam. However, as Tenzin Norgay, a researcher at the International Campaign for Tibetwith this monumental display “They are trying to tame nature.”
Your numbers. To understand the scale of this hydroelectric project, just look at the figures, since according to experts, there is nothing on the scale of this dam when talking about numbers that are stratospheric. As a first piece of information, the generation capacity stands out, which will mean between 60 and 70 GW of power.
Another important data is the annual energy production that point to 300 billion kWh per year, which is triple the capacity of the already monstrous Three Gorges Dam.
In perspective, This means generating the energy for everything the United Kingdom consumes annually, and to achieve this the project requires digging 20 kilometer long tunnels in mountainous terrain. And if that were not enough, more than one wall is needed, making the dam made up of five interconnected hydroelectric plants.
Reading these figures we can assume that it is not something cheap at all, and the truth is that we are not wrong, since the cost My dear of the entire work ranges between 167,000 and 170,000 million dollars.
It’s a risk. The great technical challenge of the Motuo dam is not only its dizzying size, but also the place chosen to build it, since the Himalayan belt is an extremely unstable at a geological level. A report by Probe International warns that incessant seismic activity puts a big question mark over this superproject, especially in a Tibetan region where 68 dams are already operating and another 101 are in the planning phase.
Looking back, recent events have highlighted the real risk of earthquakes for infrastructure located on the “roof of the world.”
Internal doubts. Even within China itself there are doubts since Chinese geologist Fan Xiao has warned that the associated risks and lack of electricity demand in sparsely populated Tibet make the project unjustified. Added to this are the enormous economic and energy transmission costs necessary to transport that electricity to the urban centers of the country.
Side B. Beijing defends the project as a necessary step towards decarbonization and here experts contextualize that this work is part of China’s strategic sustainability vision to abandon its enormous dependence on coal.
However, Darrin Magee, a hydropower expert at Western Washington University, pointed out that this source of energy is not so sustainable in the long term due to the large greenhouse gas emissions produced by the reservoirs and suggests that, in Tibet, alternating with wind and solar plants would be more prudent.
Images | Tejj
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