On Thursday, February 22, 2018 I wrote as follows:
"Take, for instance, the matter concerning the de-silting of the dam. How well have they planned/designed it? How effectively are they going to be able to de-silt the mammoth dam of the few trillion tons of silt and muck that will be deposited annually into the belly of the dam, by the flooding Punatsangchhu? Even if they have a good design, where and how are they going to dump the muck?
If the dam ever gets built, what kind of water body is the 130 Mtrs. high dam going to create? How far will the back flow be? Will the water mass trigger earth quakes? Will it alter weather patterns?"
Today, more than five years since, my fears have been proven to be not unfounded. Read the following:
Sedimentation is like pouring sand into a tumbler filled with water. The volume of water drops proportional to the amount of sand poured into it
Bhutan is lucky - in recent years our King has repeatedly cautioned his subjects about the perils of our continued romance with hydropower. We now seem to have accepted that generation of electricity from hydropower is old hat. That it is no longer seen to be economical - technological advances in other forms of energy production has rendered the hydropower redundant, and ecologically unsafe. There appears to be a welcome shift in thinking.
Sadly, something that we cannot escape is the phenomenal cost of decommissioning the dams when their useful life run out. Happily, you and I would be fertilizing some daffodils in some remote wilderness 😂
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