Redirecting a River’s Flow
Photograph by Toby Smith, Reportage by Getty Images
A new dam begins to redirect the flow of the Jiulong River into underground tunnels for power generation in central China's Sichuan Provice.
China's best known hydro project lies to the east of here, the Three Gorges Dam, on the Yangtze River in Hubei province. The largest power plant in the world at 20.5 gigawatts of capacity, Three Gorges is triple the size of the top U.S. hydropower station (Grand Coulee Dam). Its construction, completed in 2006, displaced some 1.3 million people.
And China plans to build the equivalent of more than seven Three Gorges dams in the coming years, 140 gigawatts—enough power to run all of France, as Reuters notes. It's all a part of China's plan to reduce the carbon intensity of its economy. By 2020, China's renewable energy law calls for hydropower and other non-fossil fuel sources to supply at least 15 percent of the country's energy. Still, electricity demand is growing so quickly that the new renewables will not halt the growth of greenhouse gas emissions, only slow it.
Smith says he was lured to take on the project of documenting China's efforts to reduce its reliance on fossil fuels by the scale of the infrastructure, and the pace at which it was changing. He knew China's economy was built on coal, and that foundation would be difficult to alter. "It feels less like China is making decisions between different energy types, but more decisions on how can it meet demand by using all energy types," Smith says. "As the Western economic growth stabilizes we have a stereotype is that it is a 'switch' to renewable energy. China, however, is increasing coal extraction and imports while investing heavily in wind, hydro, and solar as a complement. I nicknamed this the 'and, and, and, and' philosophy."
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