I recently posted a story on the devastation wrought by hydroelectric dams on top of climate-change-driven drought in Southeast Asia. The Mekong last year fell to record lows wrecking fisheries and damaging agriculture, partly due to lack of rain and partly due to hydroelectric dams holding back the flow. China’s multiple dams on the upper Mekong deservedly got much of the blame, but multiple dams lower down clearly contributed as well. Lao, in particular, in its bid to become the “battery of Southeast Asia,” has been damming every stream in sight, mostly tributaries to the mighty river itself. This year, despite predictions, the drought has yet to break and although China is evidently releasing ample flows, reports coming in are that things are as bad as or worse than last year in the Lower Mekong Basin, implicating those Lao dams. Even without drought, however, the dams reduce flow, block essential fish migrations and arrest the distribution of fertile silt from Lao through Thailand and Cambodia to the Delta in Vietnam.
There are many other problems with hydroelectric dams. Villages and fields are drowned under the resulting reservoir, typically with little or no compensation (is there compensation for eviction from one’s ancestral home?) and those downstream live under the looming threat of dam collapse. Though one benefit of dams is holding back floods in times of excess rain and releasing life-giving water in times of drought, they are not designed to withstand the unpredictable extremes of climate change. In 2018 there was a catastrophic dam collapse in Lao due to shoddy construction, and this year China is struggling with multiple overwhelmed dams.
Similar scenarios are playing out in other parts of the world.
(Breaking: The wonderful fragrance of newly dampened earth wafting through my window--It’s raining! It’s been raining fitfully the last few days and our rice field is muddy, if not flooded, and there’s hope for a subsistence harvest this year.)
The thing is that Southeast Asia is developing and modernizing rapidly, and that takes power, megawatts, gigawatts of it. More and more of it. As I wrote last week, people want refrigerators and air-conditioned shopping malls... and they will have them, even though generating that power threatens their way of life, their very survival.
What to do?
One possibility is run-of-river hydroelectric stations like that at Xayaburi (pictured above) and Don Sahong on the Mekong mainstream. These are not tall looming dams, but current channeled into turbines immersed in the river itself, with fish ladders and silt gates. These are not nearly as destructive as traditional hydro plants, but nevertheless impede the flow and there are indications that silt is not getting through: Clear water downstream, besides failing to re-fertilize the fields is bad for the fish and facilitates the growth of harmful algae. In any case, “not as bad” is still bad. More of these, I fear could be disastrous. Here’s a good before-the-fact critique: www.internationalrivers.org/...
A more exciting possibility is floating solar power. When I read that Lao had initiated a project to float solar panels on the Nam Ngum Dam reservoir, I thought “Brilliant! But is it possible?” Not only is it possible but a number of plants are already in service elsewhere. It’s a bit more expensive than ground-based solar, but has many advantages, not the least of which is location (Wikipedia has a nice article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_solar). The one planned for Nam Ngum will be the largest so far at 1,200 MW.
Floating installations alone may not be enough to provide growing demand, but they will certainly help. Amid all the justified alarm, and because of it, there is some optimism that solar, both floating and grounded, along with wind will win out over more dams. Although, for example, the Lao government is slated to begin work on another run-of-river dam on the Mekong, upstream of World Heritage city Luang Prabang and near an earthquake fault, an article in Asia Sentinel, suggests that this and other projects on the drawing board, may never go forward. It’s not that the Lao government has seen the light, but that hydro may have become economically unfeasible. Hydropower plants are far more expensive and take much longer to build and bring on line than wind and solar, translating to a much delayed, reduced return on investment. Vietnam, for example, caught between rising seas and a dammed-dwindling Mekong, may be backing away from previously agreed partnerships. Besides, the prospect of frequent drought threatens a fall-off in the hydro available to plunge through turbines. As the Asia Sentinel article suggests, “big hydropower projects are no longer bankable.”
What about coal? No, no, no! Don’t even think it! But Lao is looking to build its second plant, producing 1,000 MW for export, and Thailand is going ahead with its second, at 800MW, with more on the wish list. Lao’s first plant was built by Thailand specifically to feed its habit, presumably built across the border to skirt Thai environmental regulations. Protests on the Thai side were and are ignored, while Lao viciously suppresses all dissent whatsoever. Local communities continue to suffer. But even if we (Thailand) don’t get back to something resembling democracy, such mega-projects may not be bankable either.
Inter-governmental cooperation to balance conflicting needs from the Mekong and its tributaries would be helpful. But the Mekong River Commission and China’s Lancang-Mekong River Commission, have proved ineffective at best.
In any case, people, including-rice farming peasants, will have their air-conditioned shopping malls. They will not go back to grass huts, ploughing with buffalo and threshing and milling rice by hand. The power will be had, one way or the other, and this is true globally, even if we destroy ourselves getting it.
Mouths to feed and development
The fundamental problem, of course, is too many people. The earth simply cannot support this many in the style to which we are becoming accustomed. I’m pretty sure it couldn’t support this many even if we went back to grass huts and buffalo. Immanent mass starvation was predicted for Southeast Asia (but not only here) mid-twentieth century, before the Green Revolution introduced newly developed high-yield strains of grain along with chemical fertilizers and irrigation. At the same time, the threat of overpopulation led to urgent efforts to get people to stop making so many mouths to feed. My wife remembers her first husband availing himself of the cash-for-vasectomy program for whiskey money. But when the demographers looked closely, they were surprised to find lower growth rates in more economically developed communities: the more couples could afford children, the fewer they had. The economist Amartya Sen ran the stats indicating that the deciding factor is education for women—given other possibilities, she just doesn’t want to put out baby after baby after baby anymore.
There has been some success, global growth is now about one percent a year, half of what it was 50 or so years ago, and in some of the more developed countries population is actually shrinking—this is good, in spite of having too many of us idle oldsters depending on too few working youngsters. The question then, is whether we can stretch out the earth’s resources until the population shrinks down to supportable size. That’ll likely take a couple hundred years. At least.
Returning to hydroelectric dams: the demand for electricity accompanies economic development which, in turn, tamps down population growth, the root of all ecological evil. Yet producing all that power, even hydro, threatens sustainability. Development is part of the solution and part of the problem. Inventing and implementing better ways of generating power is an urgent element of stretching the resources till we get the numbers down.
(On fusion: keep working on it! Please, may it be so! Yet, I fear it’s like the sign in a pub I frequented in Cambridge: “Free Beer Tomorrow.”)