Cambodian dam plans suffer information drought

Cambodia has rejuvenated old plans to develop the country’s huge hydropower potential, big-ticket schemes to be led by Chinese investors which will simultaneously fill government coffers and have severe social and environmental impacts on local communities.

Like neighboring Laos in the 1990s, foreign donors, electricity-hungry neighboring nations such as Thailand and Vietnam and big business interests in China are all keen to transform Cambodia into a major hydropower generator. Previous plans for developing Cambodia’s hydropower potential were put on hold due to political instability and the economic chaos that followed the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis.
But with recent rapid economic growth rates in the region – including Cambodia, which notched gross domestic product

growth of around 10% in 2006 and 2007 – hydropower schemes are apparently back on the national agenda. Cambodian Foreign Minister Hor Namhong told a donor’s meeting last year that his government plans to make Cambodia into the “battery of Southeast Asia”.

A 2003 plan developed by the Ministry of Mines, Minerals and Energy, with the support of the Mekong River Commission, estimated that Cambodia has the potential to generate 10,000 megawatts of energy for internal use and export. Almost 50% of that power would be generated from projects along the mainstream Mekong River, which runs through Cambodia.

Foreign donors continue to play an important supporting role, particularly the Manila-based Asian Development Bank (ADB) through its so-called Mekong Power Grid Plan, a plan it has been pushing since the early 1990s which envisages an interconnected power grid across the entire region.

The ADB predicts that Cambodia will initially be a net electricity importer but will become a net exporter once the country’s full hydropower potential is realized. However, local and international environmental and other groups are warning that large-scale hydropower development could create serious problems, impacting on some of the country’s most pristine ecosystems and reducing water flow and fisheries with major consequences for the livelihoods of thousands of people.

Asia Times