China ponders: Are a few big hydropower projects better than many small ones?

the reserve.”

The question, Biello points out, is: Can hydropower in China be done more sustainably?
A drop in the bucket
Xiaonanhai would generate 1,760 megawatts of electricity-three quarters the yield of the U.S. Hoover Dam, but just 8 percent of Three Gorges potential 22 gigawatts, and three percent of the 60 gigawatts from the proposed dams planned along the upper Yangtze, also known as the Jinsha River.

This is why the Nature Conservancy is working on a plan that would invest Chongqing’s dam-building money into making the other dams upstream slightly bigger. “They could own as much as three times the kilowatts as they could ever get out of the little dam and keep all the fish,” says lawyer David Harrison, a senior adviser to the Conservancy’s Global Freshwater Program. “Chongqing could get the economic development they want, and a fish reserve. They may not appreciate it now but they will, as will their children.”

Already, the Chinese paddlefish, a six-meter-long endemic species, has not been spotted in more than three years in the region and may now be functionally extinct, much like the baiji — a freshwater dolphin-downriver. “Four famous domestic fishes” — the grass, silver, black,  and big carps — provide protein and a livelihood to more than ten million Chinese, yet they are dwindling in the stretch of river beneath the Three Gorges Dam, victims of the dam’s development and overfishing, says Daqing Chen of the Yangtze River Fisheries Research Institute.

The solution, according to the Conservancy, is to plan hydropower development on a watershed level rather than allowing the proliferation of projects from various levels of government: county, township, city, provincial, and even national. “There’s wildcat dam development going on. At some level, it’s out of control,” says Brian Richter, director of the environmental group’s Global Freshwater Program, adding that the proliferation of dams of all sizes are “just getting built in an uncoordinated fashion.”

As a result, a coalition of Chinese scientists and environmentalists signed a petition this May calling for a halt to “overdevelopment” of hydropower in the Yangtze River Basin. The central government’s Ministry of Environmental Protection responded in June, suspending the Xiaonanhai project pending further review-along with two other nearby dams in the Jinsha River already under construction.

The problem, Biello writes, is not dams per se. It is the lack of planning. After all, building hydropower will also enable the proliferation