Dam’ed if you Do, Dam’ed if you Don’t

A worker walking by the sluice gates of the Three Gorges DamA wave of recent coverage on China’s Three Gorges Dam continues to criticize the project for causing everything from landslides to relocation nightmares for millions, ignoring the costs of alternatives and the market realities that must be taken into consideration when evaluating energy policy.

Frankly, it’s never been clear to this writer what’s so bad about a dam.

Having spoken with environmentalists on the issue of dams over many years, their impassioned arguments have never really added up.

Taking the Three Gorges Dam as an example, the facility will produce 18 gigawatts of electricity, thus removing the need for about 35 or so coal-fired power plants in China. And while the project’s detractors fault it for causing mudslides, disrupting ecosystems and relocating families, they are ignoring the fact that air pollution and global warming—principally caused by the burning of hydrocarbons like coal—does all of those things but on an infinitely larger scale.

Traditional renewable energy sources such as wind and solar cannot keep up with annual increases in energy demand. That is the market reality that the world must face for the next several decades. In China, despite heavy regulatory emphasis on renewables of late, the total percentage of energy from renewable sources in China is expected to decline from around 7 to 4 percent over the coming decade.

In other words, no matter how gung-ho we get on windmills, greenhouse gas emissions will keep going up. The only way to slow that rise is to get more pragmatic about nuclear, hydroelectric and clean coal.

Returning to the issue at hand, the New York Times piece on the Three Gorges Dam includes a figure that China has built an average of one large dam (over 50 feet high) everyday for the last 50 years and has several huge ones on the way, including 12 on the upper stretches of the Yangtze. Having hiked through Tiger Leaping Gorge in 2001, it pains me to know that such a beautiful valley might get flooded. But again, the alternative of creating more coal wastelands like most of Shanxi province pains me as well.

Despite the obvious drawbacks to dams, people need to accept that certain sacrifices will need to be made as China develops, and a dam may in fact be a lesser of two evils.

In the meantime, support the private equity firms who are financing most of the investment in renewable energy technologies these days, lobby your government to spend more on R&D, and hope that the talks going on right now in Bali lead to some strong and pragmatic compromises.

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