On Saturday, China announced the start of one of the world’s biggest infrastructure projects: a $167 billion mega-dam in Tibet that will, when completed, be the most powerful source of hydroelectricity in history.
The Yarlung Tsangpo dam, located at a hairpin river bend where water plunges 6,500 feet through the Himalayas, will dwarf China’s existing Three Gorges Dam, currently the world’s largest, and will produce 60 gigawatts of electricity, ten times as much as the most powerful American dam, Grand Coulee in Washington State.
“You could power many medium-sized countries with 60 gigawatts,” Eurasia Group energy expert Herbert Crowther explains. “Most nuclear reactors would be around a gigawatt.”
Yarlung Tsangpo, set to be completed by 2035, is meant to stimulate the Chinese economy and boost clean energy, but it will also control waters flowing to hundreds of millions of people in neighboring India and Bangladesh at a time when tensions over water are already high.
Why is China building the dam? Like the Three Gorges Dam constructed in China in the 1990s, this will deliver a significant economic boost while also providing a major new supply of clean energy that may ultimately support the nation’s aim to achieve net-zero emissions by 2060.
“The Chinese government’s favorite infrastructure is a dam,” says Dan Wang, Eurasia Group’s China director. “The electricity generation aspect is less relevant than the massive investment, jobs, and demand for domestic technology such projects can generate.”
Water as a weapon? Downstream nations are sounding alarms, since the Yarlung Tsangpo flows through the state of Arunachal Pradesh in northeastern India before merging with the Brahmaputra River, which eventually continues into Bangladesh. Both governments are wary of a situation in which Chinese officials control access to their water.
This could trigger competitive dam-building throughout the Himalayas, as each nation scrambles to control its water resources before neighbors do. India has already announced plans to accelerate its own hydropower development near the Chinese border in response, fearing Beijing could weaponize water flows during future conflicts.
The specter of water wars isn’t theoretical — when military tensions nearly boiled over between India and Pakistan back in May, India suspended the Indus Waters Treaty that had governed water sharing between the two nations for decades. With Pakistan being one of China’s closest regional partners, the Yarlung Tsangpo dam adds another layer of complexity to an already volatile triangle of neighbors competing for the same resources..