Chinese Premier Li Qiang on July 19 announced the launch of a mega-dam project on the Tibetan Plateau, in Tibet’s Autonomous Region, in China, in what is expected to be the world’s largest hydroelectric facility, a project that has been discussed since 2020. The massive project, located in the lower reaches of the Yarlung Tsangpo River, will be the largest of its kind in the world, which, when completed, will have an estimated annual capacity of 300 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity, which is three times that possessed by the Three Gorges Dam, currently the world’s largest hydro-electric dam.
Li attended the dam’s groundbreaking ceremony in Nyingchi, a southeastern city in the Tibet Autonomous Region, Xinhua reported on July 19.
There has been a discussion of the downstream impact of the dam. The Yarlung Tsangpo River becomes the Brahmaputra River as it leaves Tibet, and flows south into India’s Arunachal Pradesh and Assam states, and finally into Bangladesh.
