Big is Beautiful? On the 'Sustainability' of Large Water Dams.

-- a _kt75 | reprint

 
 




Case Ethiopia - Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam: Ethiopia has refused to halt work on a controversial giant dam across the river Nile that Egypt fears will severely curb its water supply.
The refusal came after the Egyptian president, Mohamed Morsi, promised to "defend each drop of Nile water with our blood" and other senior Egyptian politicians called for the dam's destruction.

A spokesman for the Ethiopian prime minister said on Tuesday that Morsi's speech was irresponsible and that the project would proceed as planned.
"Nothing is going to stop the Renaissance Dam. Not a threat will stop it," Getachew Reda said via telephone. "None of the concerns the Egyptian politicians are making are supported by science. Some of them border on what I would characterise as fortune-telling."

Ethiopia hopes its Grand Renaissance dam – which will cost more than $4.3bn (£2.8bn) – will form Africa's largest hydropower plant. But Egyptian authorities have contested its construction after water experts claimed it would drastically lower the level of the Nile, which supplies almost all of Egypt's water, and could reduce cultivated farmland by up to 25%.

In a speech to Islamist supporters on Monday night, Morsi called the Nile "God's gift to Egypt", and ambiguously veered between calls for peaceful dialogue, and veiled military threats. He said that while Egypt did "not want war … we do not accept threats to our security", and claimed that all possible responses to the dam remained open to Egypt – a line that has been interpreted as a threat of force. Cont'd ... and read the supporting article.

Case Kongo (Democratic Republic of) - Grand Inga Dam: Sub-Saharan Africa, where more than three-quarters of the population is without electricity, will soon be lit up — or that’s the promise of governments building a host of new hydroelectric schemes across the continent. These projects are an attempt to keep up with the rising power demand from Africa’s economic boom. But the trouble is that, like the boom, the power seems destined to benefit only small industrial and urban elites. For the rest of Africa’s billion inhabitants, this investment looks unlikely to further UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon’s goal of “sustainable energy for all.”

The Congo River in central Africa — the world’s second-largest river after the Amazon — is the latest focus of the rush to harness the continent’s rivers for generating electricity. On May 18, the government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) announced in Paris that it was initiating the first phase of the world’s largest hydro scheme on the river’s majestic Inga Falls. At these falls, downstream from the capital Kinshasa, the massive Congo’s entire flow of 42,000 cubic meters a second cascades down a series of rapids, falling 100 meters within a 15-kilometer stretch.

South African hydro-engineer Henry Oliver has called Inga Falls “one of the greatest single natural sources of hydroelectric power in the world,” and his fellow engineers have long dreamed of tapping these waters to power an Africa-wide electricity grid. Two small schemes built in the 1970s

The completed project on the Congo would be twice the size of China’s Three Gorges dam.
and 1980s, known as Inga I and Inga II, are largely moribund, victims of the DRC’s wrecked economy and long-running civil war. Read on, consider the supporting article and try the new hydro power inventory _sustinvent+ v0.51 RC1:

_watch the promo video http://youtu.be/xi6ZMYDfkyE
_look at the presentation http://goo.gl/YqmMi
_read the white paper http://goo.gl/T8T4M

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