China’s Thousands of Small Dams

[Randy W]

China’s Thousands of Small Dams Struggle to Stay Afloat
For decades, rural areas along the Yangtze River depended on small hydropower stations. Now, amid rising ecological costs and safety concerns, the government wants to make them more sustainable.

from the Sixth Tone

The sluice of a hydropower station sits open in Guiyang, Guizhou province, June 2020. Qin Gang/People Visual

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Though small hydropower is considered clean energy, factors like unsustainable development, technical restrictions, illegal construction, and insufficient regulation — all of which led to yearslong overexploitation — have forced a rethink on these stations.

And with stretches of some rivers shrinking, or even drying up, the government in late 2018 launched a “rectification” campaign to start improving the quality of around 25,000 small hydropower plants in 10 provinces as well as directly administered municipalities in the Yangtze River Economic Belt.

About two years into this drive, data from the Ministry of Water Resources showed that more than 21,000 stations had adjusted their water flow to meet ecological requirements, 3,090 were dismantled, and 903 are scheduled for demolition.

End of an era

Chen’s hydropower station was among the first deemed in need of “rectification.” He received a notice to this effect in 2019 because, when storing water during dry spells, the Hongsha Hydropower Station could cause sections of the river downstream to shrink or even dry up.

The notice stated that the Hongsha Hydropower Station hadn’t produced an environmental impact assessment report, hadn’t completed land approval procedures, had no standardized management protocol, and presented several safety risks. Chen was given until August 2020 to complete renovations.

“In the past, while constructing power stations, we were allowed to get things off the ground quickly and patch up inadequacies later. At the time, they were encouraging everyone to build — especially smaller stations like ours — and the quality of stations was basically the same everywhere,” says Chen.

He says he didn’t understand the sudden rectification notice, and wanted to stall it for as long as he could. It wasn’t until a government task force came knocking on his door that he realized there was no choice.

“Now that they’re asking us to renovate, we definitely feel some resentment. If we let water flow through our facilities without turning it into power, it’s a lost opportunity to make money. Renovation also costs money, and ‘ecological water flow’ was never a requirement in the past,” he says.