Sunday, November 20, 2011

Dam It




Laos is going ahead with plans to build the 1200 megawatt Xayaburi dam on the mainstream of the Mekong river just inside the LaosCambodia border. That is happening in spite of opposition by the other three members of the Mekong River Commission – Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. Laos wants to be earn money by being the ‘battery’ of Southeast Asia. All three other countries are currently experiencing power supply problems so there definitely is a market for power, though if all planned dams were built the current shortage would turn into a huge surplus. Electricity consumption in Cambodia is growing at about 25% a year and as we all know from frequent blackouts for now the country can barely keep up.

There are valid reasons why a country would want to develop its hydropower resources. Primarily, it’s relatively cheap, and once the dam is built, the cost of power isn’t going to rise.

It’s indigenous, so doesn’t require the use of foreign exchange to purchase fuel from outside. Cambodia now gets 90% of its in-country produced power from burning fossil fuels. Vietnam is now supplying a substantial amount of power mostly because of the Prime Minister’s entreaties, since they have a close relationship. They’re doing that somewhat reluctantly since they’re experiencing their own supply problems. Cambodia is in the process of converting its power plants from relatively expensive diesel to much cheaper bunker oil – fuel used on ships – but it’s still very expensive.

Hydropower is renewable and clean and produces no greenhouse gases, its greatest benefit. It concurrently has lots of downsides and the social and environmental impacts should be taken seriously. There are always trade-offs: sometimes they are relatively benign and in balance make the location worthy of hydro development.

Dams often involve dislocation of large numbers of people or inundation of substantial areas of forest or farmland. The farmland is an especial loss, since if it’s part of the flood plain, it’s the most fertile, highest quality land. Damming a steep mountain canyon would involve the loss of forest and wildlife habitat. There’s also the loss of scenic areas. China’s Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest, is a case in point: One of the most spectacular scenic areas in the world has been inundated.

In some areas reservoirs created by dams become toxic soups - China, again makes a good example. The raw sewage and industrial pollution that flows on to the sea in a free-flowing river is bad enough, but when that noxious concoction becomes trapped behind a dam it festers in a witches brew and is arguably much worse for the environment. On the other hand if the water is coming off an uninhabited mountainous area, the reservoir can be an important recreation site for boating, fishing and even windsurfing in areas that are sufficiently breezy.

In the case of Laos’ Xayaburi dam or any dam built across the mainstream of the Mekong river in its lower reaches, the greatest impact will be on fisheries. Cambodians get 80% of their protein from fish and a large part of that is from the Mekong/Tonle Sap system. It’s been estimated that 70% of the migratory fish in the Mekong would be cut off from their upriver spawning grounds by the Xayaburi dam. Damming the mainstream also threatens the natural flow of water up into Tonle Sap Lake and spells ruin if the Mekong’s overflow isn’t sufficient to fill the lake.

Part of the way dams work is they store water during wet seasons to be released later in the dry, thus evening out power production and minimizing flooding. But once again that potentially spells disaster since the Tonle Sap depends on flooding to bring nutrients up with the overflow of the Mekong. China already has several dams across its section of the Mekong but only 15% of the total flow comes from China. Nevertheless, that margin might be enough to cause the system to crash if too much water is withheld. By the time Laos builds the dozen or so dams it is planning across the Mekong the Tonle Sap fisheries may well be toast. One smaller problem with depending on dams for power production is that they produce the least power – in the hot dry season – when it’s needed the most.

A public official, when asked about the loss of fisheries from dam building, stated something to the effect that some people had to sacrifice so everybody could have power. Easy for him to say since he needs power for air-conditioning and other middle-class creature comforts, whereas the peasantry loses its sustenance.

The Columbia River in America’s Pacific Northwest provides a good example of the results of that kind of thinking. The Columbia is America’s second largest river. The dams built across it starting in the 1930’s provide the area with some of the cheapest electricity in America, but they also destroyed one of the most productive salmon fisheries in the world. Salmon are anadromous fish that live most of their lives in the sea but return to freshwater rivers to spawn. After three years roaming the seas they return to the very spot - within a very small margin - they were hatched to spawn and create another generation. Quite amazing really to think of fish knowing where they were born.

Before the dams were built there were between ten and sixteen million salmon a year returning to the Columbia. Some traveled as much as 600 miles upstream to spawn. Today there are about 100,000 and most of those are hatchery fish which are grown upstream in controlled conditions and shipped in trucks past the dams. A newsreel clip from the 30’s summed up the trade-off. It said, Say goodbye to the salmon, progress is coming to the Columbia River. So a minimum ten million salmon per year ranging from 20 to 40 kilos each were exchanged for cheap power. The electricity supply created by the dams was so much greater than regional demand that aluminum smelters, which use vast amounts of power in the smelting process, were encouraged to locate there with additional subsidies over and above the already cheap rates.

Before the dams salmon were so easy to catch that Native Americans fed them to their dogs and any half way decent fisherman could have as much as he/she wanted. They were so cheap to purchase that everybody else could also have their fill. Even today there are only about 4 million people in the Columbia Basin so there would’ve been plenty for all. Wild salmon today are very expensive. Farmed salmon are available at a more reasonable price – though still not cheap - but as an indicator of their unnatural lifestyle, they have to be fed salmon coloring to look real.

The dams could’ve been designed with fish ladders to allow salmon passage but that wasn’t considered important at the time. Today, there’s talk of removing the dams as well as spending vast sums to adapt the dams for the salmon. Though the giant ones across the mainstream of the Columbia are likely to be around for a while, many smaller dams in the area are being decommissioned to allow for the return of free-flowing rivers. Many were built with 50 year operating licenses and when they come up for renewal they have to be adapted to conform to stringent new rules for fish passage. In some cases the new rules are so expensive to implement, the utilities find it cheaper to decommission the dams than conform.

Today Southeast Asia is at the beginning of the dam building cycle. Everybody is all fired up about producing as much power as possible. Laos has plans to produce far more than they will ever need themselves. Cambodia has around ten dams under construction or in later planning stages in its smaller rivers, plus it has its own plans for damming the mainstream of the Mekong. China, with its deep pockets, is eager to finance them. This, needless to say, is a mixed blessing. When asked about China’s dam builders’ commitment to environmental protection, a public official remarked that they follow the same rules as in China so why worry? Some reassurance there.

Sinohydro, the Chinese company that’s building the Kamchey Dam on the Kampot River in the mountains about 12 kilometers above the city, was the builder of the Three Gorges dam in China. Because of shoddy work done there it is banned from building any more dams in its home country… but there’s always work to do in countries like Cambodia. The great Kampot flood of 2009 was caused at least in part by a breach in the dam, though both company and government vehemently denied that.

What we call the Kampot river is actually called Kompong Bay and is an estuary, a tidal river which ebbs and flows with the tides. The city sits right at sea level so is vulnerable to flooding when, as happened in 2009, a strong storm surge during high tide comes in from the ocean at the same time that heavy rains come off the mountains. During that flood a local resident heard rock trucks heading up to the dam all night and early into the morning when normally they quit at dark. A friend, who’s been in the area for 15 years sent one of his Khmer staff up to check out the dam: he managed to get by the guards to see a gaping breach in the dam, evidently caused by the heavy storms. Now there’s nothing unusual about flooding in Kampot, it happens with regularity, but in that case it was exacerbated by negligence, incompetence or miscalculation on the part of Sinohydro.

But beggars can’t be choosers. If you are desperate for power to fuel a rapidly expanding economy and somebody comes by with a fully funded dam proposal you jump at the chance. You are so grateful you don’t concern yourself with the fine print. Needless to say, the Chinese are skillful negotiators and they don’t build dams in Cambodia out of the good of their hearts. As a result some of the dams under construction here come with onerous terms which require the government to pay substantial compensation to the dam owners even when the electricity isn’t needed or used. While the main point of constructing dams is access to cheap power, it won’t be anywhere near as cheap as it could’ve been if the government had a stronger bargaining position.

Moreover, similar to the excess power produced on the Columbia River, Cambodia has plans for hydropower production that currently far surpasses its needs. The Lower Sesan River II dam which is nearing construction phase in Stung Treng province is a case in point. Vietnam is financing that project to the tune of $800 million. It will produce 400 megawatts of power, most of which will be exported to Vietnam. The entire city of Phnom Penh consumes about 300 megawatts so in comparison very little of that 400 mw will be used in Cambodia’s sparsely populated northeast. Meanwhile, the human and environmental cost will be substantial. To begin with, five thousand people will be displaced and 30,000 hectares of farm and forest lands will be submerged. In addition as many as 100,000 people will see their fish catches reduced. The dam will also impact at least a dozen fish species that migrate between the Tonle Sap and the Sesan River and its tributaries. Cambodia will essentially be sacrificing its environment and the livelihoods of large numbers of its people in order to sell power to Vietnam.  

Smaller dams like the Sesan II have less impact on people and the environment than the giant dams proposed for the mainstream of the Mekong but everybody likes to think big and bigger projects pencil out better so they’re always preferred by dam builders and policy makers. Small dams can have severe impacts on local people, but at least they generally don’t wreck the whole system.

It’s easy for a rich government official to say some people have to sacrifice so everybody can have power but what he’s really talking about is many people losing their sustenance and livelihoods so others like him can air-condition their mansions.

It’ll be a sad day if Laos goes ahead with its plans for the Xayaburi dam in spite of the opposition of its neighbors but it won’t be the first time an ecosystem has been unnecessarily degraded to the detriment of many because of the blindness of the few.

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