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CHENGDU, China- Even in China, where power plants, coal mines, water-transport networks, and other big tools of industrialization are built at astonishing scale and with surprising speed, the hydropower dam construction program in Sichuan, Yunnan, Tibet, and other southwest provinces has no equal in China, or anywhere else for that matter.

Israeli journalist Rachel Beitarie reports on China’s mammoth dam-building program for Circle of Blue, the sixth chapter in the Choke Point: China series that I’m editing and helping to report and write. Next week, we leave for China to publicly disclose the findings in the series in a series of events that start on April 1 with a conference appearance at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. Big takeaway for me is that while the United States is pursuing an energy policy designed to perpetuate the fossil fuel era, China is aggressively mastering every form of energy available. Not veto in the system is why.

Here in Suijiang County-a remote and mountainous region on the border between Sichuan and Yunnan provinces-the immense scope of the most aggressive dam-building program in history is immediately apparent. Near the county’s center, an army of men and equipment is building the Xiangjiaba Dam, a wall of concrete and steel that is 909 meters (2,982 feet) long and 161 meters (528 feet) high.

When completed in 2015, the dam will house eight turbines capable of generating just over 6.4 gigawatts. It will be the fourth-largest hydropower plant in China and one of the 20 largest power plants of any kind in the world, according to industry figures.

The Chinese government’s vigor for hydropower has stirred resistance in villages upriver from the Xianjiaba project, where farmers are about to lose their homes. Filling the reservoir will require 60,000 people to leave. Among them are the residents of Guan Tian village, who were forced to relocate six months ago, well ahead of the scheduled relocation; and in a hurry. Residents were told that the construction was going to cause a landslide that would bury their village.

“Luckily there were no casualties. We all got out in time,” an elderly woman-who, like all of her neighbors, has asked that her name not be mentioned-told Circle of Blue. The entire population of Guan Tian now lives in shacks on rented land. Residents were given temporary compensation of $US 45 a month, though a number of residents complain that, in the last two months, the money has failed to arrive.

In November, protesting villagers blocked traffic to the dam site for eight hours, a farmer in his forties told Circle of Blue. “We were detained for interrupting public order, and a few men were put in administrative detention for two weeks.”

The protests, however, went unheeded by the provincial government officials, as well as those in distant Chongqing-the fastest growing city in the world-which is starving for energy to feed booming industry and a growing middle class.

Immense as it is, the Xiangjiaba Dam is just one of a dozen hydropower projects of similar scale in what Chinese engineers call a “cascade” of electricity-generating projects that have been approved for the Jinsha River-a 2,300-kilometer section of the Yangtze River in Sichuan Province. An even larger project, the 278-meter-tall (911-foot) Xiluodo Dam, is nearing completion downstream and will have the capacity to generate 12.6 GW of electricity. Taken together, the 12 Jinsha River dams will be capable of generating 59 GW, or nearly as much power as all 4,000 hydroelectric generating stations in the United States.

China already operates half of the world’s large hydropower dams, and there are more on the way-many more.

Along China’s midsection, the upper Yangtze River and five of its tributaries have 100 big dams that are in various stages of planning, engineering, and construction. Additionally, at least 43 big dams are in the same stages of development on the Lancang, Nujiang, Hongshui, and Jiulong rivers in China’s southwest.

Big Risk, Big Reward
The stakes for China’s dam-building campaign encompass every sector of the economy, as well as a historical and ecological heritage that spans seven southern provinces. The provincial and central government leaders who support China’s program to tame wild rivers with concrete, steel, and stone assert that hydropower provides considerable benefits to reduce air pollution, rein in coal consumption, and generate electricity for fast-growing cities and industries.

But opponents say the dams are wrecking treasured canyons, ruining fisheries, and displacing hundreds of thousands of residents. Some critics worry that most of China’s new big dams are being built in a seismically active region that has experienced a number of big earthquakes, including one in May 2008 that killed 80,000 people in Sichuan Province. A number of scientists theorized that the weight of the lake held back by the 760-MW Zipingpu Dam-built less than two kilometers from a major fault line-may have helped to trigger the disaster.

Just as significantly, opponents note that China is planning to generate a considerable portion of its energy from hydropower, relying on rivers that are becoming more susceptible to droughts. Because of climate change, say scientists, China’s southern region is experiencing longer and more numerous droughts that are lowering water levels.

See more at Circle of Blue.

– Keith Schneider

President Barack Obama is a good fellow at work in a difficult era, to say the least. So this post is not intended to be a slam on the president. Still, it is a good idea for Obama to be much more cautious when he draws from conventional wisdom, and the word of aides, to publicly express his view that a big energy sector is safe.

You’ll recall that on March 31, 2010, President Obama announced the government would open much of the Atlantic coastline and the eastern Gulf of Mexico to oil and gas exploration, deeming the benefits to the economy and security higher than the risks. Three weeks later the Deepwater Horizon exploded, releasing a torrent of oil into the Gulf.

Then in January, the president called for tripling public financing for new nuclear power plants in the State of the Union, and in public statements before and afterwards cited Japan’s long record as evidence that nuclear-generated electricity was safe. Seven weeks later, after being struck by an earthquake and tsunami, Japan’s 4,696 mw Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant is completely destroyed and leaking life-threatening levels of radiation.

The Telegraph is reporting that Japan was warned about the vulnerability of its nuclear plants and that “an official from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said in December 2008 that safety rules were out of date and strong earthquakes would pose a “serious problem” for nuclear power stations,” in Japan.

The Fukushima plant, by the way, is the 27th largest power generating installation in the world, the 12th largest nuclear station globally, and the second largest nuclear plant in Japan. It’s also one of the oldest nuclear plants in Japan.

– Keith Schneider

In an era of economic turmoil that has produced massive unemployment, accelerated industrial decline, and sowed fear and doubt across much of North America and Europe, China last week offered a much different lesson on growth and development.

In the latest draft of its new 12^th Five-Year Plan to manage the world’s fastest growing industrial economy, China’s leadership called for restraining the runaway growth that is raising the incomes of more than 400 million people, but is also drawing China ever closer to a potentially calamitous confrontation over energy, water, and the quality of the nation’s environment. You can read more about the 12th Five-Year Plan and other developments in China over at Circle of Blue, where we’ve been rolling out weekly chapters of our Choke Point: China series.

Take a look at the series. It provides a first-of-its-kind journalistic window on the big steps China is taking to close a critical resource shortage affecting its modernization — the diminishing supplies of fresh water needed to process and cool the coal-fired energy sector. The series also invites readers from western democracies, particularly those in the United States, to peek into a centralized governing system that operates on a much different set of principles and values.

At this point, the U.S. system is almost entirely geared to shutting down, turning off, saying “No!” to big ideas. The result is a nation in stasis at a time of swift transition. China, meanwhile, has no veto power in its system and it attacks and executes big ideas — clean energy, rail transport, urban development, water transport, high-tech manufacturing, infrastructure construction — at a speed and scale never before experienced in human history. (That’s high-rise residential construction in Xian, a city of 8 million, in pix above.)

The new Five-Year Plan, which serves as China’s master development strategy, reflects the ambition of a huge nation intent on supplanting the U.S. as the most prosperous and powerful on Earth. Given the arduous path America has set for itself in the 21st century — fearful, suspicious, and reluctant to seize the new opportunities of the 21st century — it’s easy to see how close China is to reaching its goal.

The 12^th Five-Year Plan, submitted for review on March 5 at the start of China’s annual plenary session in Beijing and signed on March 10, sets a new limit on energy consumption in order to spur efficiency and conservation measures. But it also envisions record high levels of water use, which is expected to rise to 620 billion cubic meters (163 trillion gallons) by 2015-up from 599 billion cubic meters (158 trillion gallons) in 2010-and as much as 670 billion cubic meters (177 trillion gallons) by the end of the decade. The restraints on coal production, which supplies 70 percent of the nation’s energy and is the largest industrial consumer of fresh water, will serve to keep water use from climbing even higher.

In public statements and in interviews with Chinese media, the nation’s top leaders said the central focus of the new Five-Year Plan is to curb inflation and provide investments and guidance that improves the quality of life by ensuring the continuing development of manufacturing, transportation infrastructure, domestic production, the energy sector, research, science, health care, and education. But the leaders asserted that the 12^th Five-Year Plan, the master economic blueprint that will chart China’s development through 2015, also is meant to reckon with the damage that the nation’s modernization is causing to air, land, and water, a steadily diminishing resource.

From 2000 to 2009, total water reserves in China dropped 13 percent, and water scarcity is especially evident in the northern and western provinces, where China’s major coal reserves lie. By calling for limits on energy production, China’s leaders are apparently mindful of the dangerous choke point developing between the nation’s surging economy and its demand for opening new coal reserves in the dry provinces that cannot currently be tapped because of water shortages.

“The 12th Five-Year Plan period is crucial for building a moderately prosperous society in all respects and for deepening reform and opening up and speeding up the transformation of the pattern of economic development,” said Premier Wen Jiabao in a statement.

Largest and Fastest-Is Restraint Possible?

But it is not at all clear that China’s provincial and industrial leaders-never mind the hundreds of millions of workers benefiting from modernization-will be eager to comply with the goals of the new development strategy.

During extensive reporting in December for the Choke Point: China series, Circle of Blue found a nation that grumbles about pollution, inflation, and corruption, but also is tremendously enthusiastic about modernization and the economic opportunities it has provided.

The restraints on economic growth described in the 12^th Five-Year Plan come in the midst of a massive and politically popular economic transition that is rapidly converting China’s economy from its previous focus on export-related revenue to one devoted to building domestic markets.

Just to name a few, China now has either the fastest-growing or the largest-markets in the world for:

• Cars
• Steel
• Cement
• Glass
• Residential housing
• Rail construction
• Fossil fuel energy
• Highway development
• Power plant construction
• Grain production

Over the next five years, China will continue to build one of the world’s largest water transport projects, the world’s largest highway and high-speed rail networks, and the world’s largest network of hydropower dams. China also will continue to construct the world’s largest industrial manufacturing installations, or “bases,” to produce the components and plants that generate energy from coal, wind, solar, and nuclear power.

Read more here.

– Keith Schneider