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The Dangerous Future of New
Hydroelectric power.
![](images/images_03_16_2022/pic4.png)
The Tapovan Vishnugad plant following a deadly landslide in 2021.
Photographer: Prashanth Vishwanathan for Bloomberg Green
Green
Climate Adaptation
Dams Are Becoming More Dangerous to Build as Good Sites
Run Out
With
viable hydro sites scarce, dam builders around the world are pushing
into high-risk areas, often based on outdated climate data.
By
Peter Millard and
Rajesh Kumar Singh March 14, 2022
It
had been snowing hard for days in the Indian Himalayas before a thaw
set in. Then, at 10:21 a.m. on Feb. 7, 2021, part of Ronti peak
cracked and fell off the mountain.
The resulting
landslide had enough rock and ice to fill 12,000 Olympic
swimming pools and was moving at 120 miles an hour when it reached the
base of the Ronti Gad river valley. Friction melted the ice and
created a deluge that raged downriver and devastated two hydropower
plants, killing more than 200 workers and residents.
It
shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Ever since the larger of the two
dams was announced two decades ago, scientists have warned that the
earthquake- and avalanche-prone valley was a hazardous location.
India’s biggest power producer, NTPC Ltd., had proceeded with the
Tapovan Vishnugad project anyway, and in 2013 it was damaged along
with more than 30 other dams in the region from flash floods and a
glacial lake outburst. Then came last year’s landslide.
NTPC
is undeterred by two natural disasters in less than a decade at a
project that still hasn’t produced any power. Construction workers
were busy removing debris and repairing mangled structures in the
freezing cold when a Bloomberg
Green reporter
visited the region in February, just over a year after the disaster.
The company didn’t respond to a request for comment.
“Whenever it rains, we fear for our lives,” says Bhawan Rana, the head
of Raini village, where residents could see one of the dams being
swept away. “The mindless construction has shaken up the foundations
of our homes.”
![](images/images_03_16_2022/pic5.png)
Workers
repair the Tapovan Vishnugad plant.Photographer:
Prashanth Vishwanathan for Bloomberg Green
Many
locals think they’d be better off without the hydro project. The
morning of the landslide, Prem Singh, 47, was jolted by a noise
similar to that of a low-flying helicopter and stepped outside to see
a gray expanse of water, rock, and sediment engulf the valley. His
mother, Amrita Devi, 73, had left Raini earlier to farm silkworms in
the mulberry fields. He never saw her again.
Producing more of the world’s energy from hydropower will be crucial
to keep global warming in check. The International Energy Agency (IEA)
is calling for hydropower to double
by 2050 as a step to reaching net-zero emissions, but the
$1 trillion in planned expansions globally will add only about 500
gigawatts, or about 38% of current capacity.
Since
1882, when the first commercial hydro plant began operation on the Fox
River in Wisconsin, utilities have focused on economically viable
spots where rivers flow fast enough to spin turbines. But 140 years
later the most suitable sites—especially
in the developed world, where financing is easier—have already been tapped,
and builders are moving into more hazardous regions such as the
Himalayas or deeper into protected areas like the Amazon.
![](images/images_03_16_2022/pic6.png)
Raini Village.Photographer:
Prashanth Vishwanathan/Bloomberg
The
vast majority of new projects are in the developing world, where they
are routinely delayed, go over budget, and occupy vulnerable sites.
They’re also made more risky by the effects of climate change, which
in turn constrains their potential to help prevent future warming.
Designs for many new and planned dams have been created without using
climate models or rely on old data that overestimate rainfall or
underestimate potential damage from floods and erosion, according to
scientists. This puts the financial viability of new sites in question
and workers and communities at risk.
“Hydroelectric projects are often planned according to past climate, a
climate that is probably not relevant anymore,” says Homero Paltán, a
water and climate researcher at the World Bank and the University of
Oxford. “This is not very well discussed, and it has repercussions for
global energy markets.”
Two
officials at Tapovan, who requested anonymity because they aren’t
authorized to speak to the media, defend the project for helping to
meet India’s energy demands. They acknowledge the need for more
rigorous research when selecting sites but say the incident last
February wasn’t a direct result of climate change. (Melting glaciers
and permafrost are exacerbating the frequency and intensity of
landslides in the Himalayas, according to scientists, but no published
studies have specifically examined the link between global warming and
the disaster.) The officials also cite the need for early-warning
systems, currently dependent on a network of residents who pass on
information via WhatsApp messages. The disaster in 2021 delayed
completion by about a year until 2024, they say.
Just
upstream from Tapovan, the small Rishiganga hydro project was the
first to get flattened last February. Kundan Group, which acquired the
project from bankruptcy in 2018, is still deciding whether to rebuild,
says Gaurav Agarwal, deputy general manager for power sales at Kundan.
Apart from natural disasters, reduced water flow from the receding
glaciers is a wider problem for the industry in India.
“Climate change is a big deal. For any hydropower project, a certain
level of water discharge from the source is very necessary. If you
have a location where the water discharge levels are decreasing
continuously, you will not get the amount of water that you had
planned for,” Agarwal says.
![](images/images_03_16_2022/pic7.png)
The Rishiganga project after the
landslide.
Photographer: Prashanth Vishwanathan/Bloomberg
On
the southern edge of Brazil’s Amazon rainforest, planners for the Belo
Monte dam in Para state used average rainfall from 1931 into this
century instead of limiting it to a more recent sample. Precipitation
has fallen short since the first turbine opened in 2016, and the
fourth-biggest hydro facility in the world on paper hasn’t turned a
profit for two years as it ramped up generation.
Swiss
Re, which insures hydroelectric projects around the world, insists on
10 years of recent, uninterrupted climate data before offering
policies, says Rubem Hofliger, its head of Latin America. “The risk
you had in the 1980s isn’t the risk you have in the 2020s. You take a
shorter period,” he says. “The problem with developing countries is
the lack of data for an adequate index.”
The
400-megawatt Vishnuprayag project, downstream from Tapovan, was one of
the first in the region when it started operating in 2006. Keeping it
online hasn’t been easy. In 2013 it was shut for 10 months because of
that year’s flood damage, and it was down for a month in 2021 after
the February deluge, according to Ravi Chadha, the project’s director.
In
July a landslide blocked the riverbed where water gets discharged from
the dam, and workers are still clearing out rocks. The day a reporter
visited the area, a boulder fell and temporarily blocked the access
road to the dam.
“People haven’t seen such landslides in their living memory.
Landslides are getting generated in new locations,” says Chadha,
adding that developers should choose safer sites even if it means less
water.
![](images/images_03_16_2022/pic8.png)
An engineer inspects a turbine at the Vishnuprayag plant.
Photographer: Prashanth Vishwanathan for Bloomberg Green
To be
sure, drought is a much bigger concern for hydropower than floods. As
much as 80% of existing and planned hydropower projects in the
developing world are in areas where droughts are expected to become
10% longer, according to Paltán.
One
of them is Brazil’s
Belo Monte. It doesn’t produce anywhere near its 11.2GW
capacity, and it never will. Belo Monte was designed as a
run-of-the-river dam without large reservoirs to limit the
environmental impact, and as a result it operates near capacity only
during the rainy months.
Even
with all 24 turbines operational for the first time in 2021, it was a
drought year, and generation was only 3.6GW on average. This year
looks better in terms of precipitation, but it’s unclear if Belo Monte
will reach the minimum 4.6GW it pledged to deliver annually when
approved for construction. Norte Energia, which operates Belo Monte,
said in an email that it provided 8.4% of Brazil’s hydropower last
year despite the drought, and it expects that share to increase in
2022, thanks in part to record water flows in January.
A
combination of global warming and domestic deforestation is
undermining the project’s economics. Brazil’s Amazon lost an area the
size of Connecticut in 2021. The deforestation dries out the so-called
flying rivers that carry moisture to southern Brazil, Paraguay, and
Argentina. Belo Monte’s power generation will be 10% less than
expected from 2021 to 2050, according to Edmundo Wallace Monteiro
Lucas, a meteorologist at Brazil’s National Institute of Meteorology
who has researched the region.
The
global explosion in wind parks and solar farms doesn’t negate the need
for more hydroelectricity. The use of fluctuating renewable power only
increases reliance on so-called dispatchable energy, or backup power
that can be turned on and off at a moment’s notice, such as hydro and
nuclear. India, for example, has plans to quadruple renewable energy
by the end of the decade, but it needs more hydro, nuclear, and
batteries to avoid relying on coal or natural gas as a reserve power
source.
“When
it’s not windy or when it’s not sunny, you still want electricity,”
says Alex Campbell, head of research and policy at the International
Hydropower Association, an industry trade group. “We need to plan now
to get that flexibility in place for the future, or we fall back on
coal, and nobody wants that.”
Solar
is poised to grow twentyfold by 2050, followed by an elevenfold
increase in wind, according to the IEA. Although industrial batteries
and green hydrogen may come to play a balancing role, if hydro fails
to double in size, the world could remain reliant on fossil fuels to
back up the grid. Nuclear is also poised to double by 2050, but it’s
not enough to compensate for a shortfall in river-fed turbines.
Nowhere is the threat to hydro more apparent than in the vast Tibetan
Plateau, sometimes called the “Asian water tower” because it holds at
extreme elevations the most ice outside of the polar regions. The pace
of melting has doubled in the past 20 years, and two-thirds of the
glaciers could be gone by the end of the century. China, India, Nepal,
and Pakistan are rushing to harness as much of the water’s power as
they can even as global warming brings additional risks. China has
plans for its biggest megadam yet in a valley five times as deep as
the Grand Canyon, even though a landslide in 2018 created a lake that
could potentially flood the construction site.
Hydropower Capacity by Region
At the end of 2020
Source: International Hydropower Association
When
mountains melt, they move. Permafrost loosens up and leaves steep
valleys more exposed to avalanches and erosion. Landslides create
fragile lakes, like the one that burst in India in 2013. The resulting
deluge is short-lived but can pack more energy than a 100-year
rainfall. Glacial lake outbursts have claimed hydroelectric facilities
in the Andes mountains as well as the Himalayas.
“The
best sites are already occupied, so if you want to expand you go
further upstream,” says Wolfgang Schwanghart, a physical geographer at
the University of Potsdam in Germany who’s published research on the
February disaster in India and lake outbursts in the Himalayas.
“Larger projects are increasingly occupying steeper sites that are
vulnerable to hazards, and feasibility reports underestimate these.”
For a
study he published in 2016, Schwanghart mapped out 2,359 glacial
meltwater lakes in the Himalayas and found that 56 hydro projects are
close enough to be damaged in the event of a lake outburst. In total,
about 90% of East Asia’s installed hydropower and 50% of planned
expansions are at risk of high river flows and more recurrent floods,
according to a separate study Paltán published in 2021.
But
less than 20% of the 500GW of hydropower potential in the Himalayas
has been tapped. A 2017 study published in Nature
Energy found that
39% of the remaining potential for hydropower is in the Asia-Pacific
region, followed by South America, with 25%, and Africa, with 24%.
Governments, under pressure to meet surging electricity demand, are
turning to hydro with a sense of urgency.
There
is also more competition for the water. Population growth and rising
temperatures are forcing agriculture to rely more on irrigation.
Expanding cities and industries also need fresh water. New dams can
create geopolitical tension: Turkey, for instance, is damming the
headwaters of the Euphrates and restricting flows into neighboring
countries.
All
this means that hydropower, historically the backbone of renewable
energy, is ill prepared to meet the demands of the 21st century. The
industry will need to upgrade legacy plants and bring down costs for
technologies such as pumped storage, where water is pumped from a
lower elevation to a higher one so it can be released later, the
downward flow generating power on short notice. “Even before climate
change, we had more water variability than hydropower producers were
comfortable with, and it has only gotten worse,” says Judith Plummer
Braeckman, a senior research associate at the Cambridge Institute for
Sustainability Leadership. “It leaves us needing to diversify more.”
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