July 29, 2025 • 14 mins
China is building the largest power plant the world has ever seen, in a very remote corner of Tibet. But the $167 billion hydropower dam has environmentalists and neighboring countries concerned.
On today’s Big Take Asia Podcast, host Menaka Doshi speaks to Bloomberg’s Dan Murtaugh about the engineering and geopolitical challenges, and the impact construction will have on the country’s economy.
Read more: Xi Ties His Legacy and China’s Economy to $167 Billion Dam
Further listening: China's Plans to Make AI a Utility
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Bloomberg Audio studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
Earlier this month, China officially started construction on a massive
hydropower dam in tibetan Yaoum. The dam, when completed, will
be the biggest power plant on the planet.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
It's three times bigger than the largest power plant in
the world right now. It's more than all of the
power plants in Poland combined.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
Dan Mortor covers the energy industry for Bloomberg from Beijing.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
The amount of cement their estimating their need it would
be enough to fill more than fifty Hoover dams, and
the amount of steel. It would be enough to build
one hundred and sixteen Empire state buildings.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
This mega project comes with a mega price stack one
hundred and sixty seven billion dollars.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
This would be one of the most expensive undertakings for
infrastructure in human history, more expensive than the International Space Station.
You're looking at decades long projects like building the US
Interstate Highway system before you get to comparable amounts of investment.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
China says the dam will provide a major source of
clean energy. More importantly, it will boost the country's slowing economy.
But the project carries huge engineering and environmental risks and
could strain relations with two of its neighbors, India and Bangladesh.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
The Indian government has been worried about if China was
able to build a dam, they would then be able
to use sort of water access as a pain point
if there was an eventual conflict between the countries. And
there's going to be all of this human activity in
a place that's been remote for most of its history.
You hope for the best, but human history has not
(01:52):
been very kind to the planet Earth, and you just
have to wonder if they're going to be able to
rain in people from not damaging that really area.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
This is the Big Take Asia from Bloomberg News. I'm
Mini Kadoshi filling in for one half every week. We
take you inside some of the world's biggest and most
powerful economies and the markets, tycoons and businesses that drive
this ever shifting region. Today on the show, China bats
(02:24):
big on a new mega dam, Why the project is
raising alarm with its neighbors, and what its construction could
mean for China's economy and its green energy ambitions. When
it comes to building hydro dams, China has got plenty
(02:47):
of experience. It operates two of the world's largest dams.
That includes the world's biggest hydro dam, Three Gorges, which
opened in central China in two thousand and nine. This
this new megadam will be built in Tibet, a mountainous
region just north of the border with India.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
It's in this bend on the Arlansangwo River that they
call like the Medor or Moto Gorge.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
And Bloomberg Energy reporter Dan Motor says the dam is
in an area that till recently was very difficult to
get to.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
It is a very, very very steep drop. The river
drops about two thousand meters over a fifty klometer stretch
as it curves and bends through the mountains of the Himalayas.
The county that it's at is up until twenty thirteen
didn't even have a highway that connected it. You'd have
to walk a day, you know, or take a donkey
or a horse to get to the river from the
(03:44):
closest highway.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
Most dams, like the Hoover Dam, block the path of
a river to create a reservoir. They then release the water,
which turns turbines and generates electricity. This Yar Lungsangpo Dam
is different.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
What they're trying to do here is a little bit
more audacious. The idea is to drill a tunnel through
the mountains down that steep, steep, steep gradient, and then
divert some of the water from going around that big
bend and instead go basically just vertically straight down the mountain.
That steep gradient that this river moves on really allows
(04:23):
you to get that water flowing at high enough speeds
to be able to run the turbines to generate the electricity.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
At the groundbreaking ceremony earlier this month, Chinese Premier Li
Chiang called the Yar Lungsanko Dam the project of the century.
State engineers have said it has the potential to generate
as much as seventy gigawatts of electricity. That's enough to
power the United Kingdom.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
It's three times bigger than the largest power plant in
the world right now. It is a national, country level
type of generating asset, but China's huge. China has about
four thousand gigawatts of total generating capacity right now. Its
peak demand is about one four hundred and fifty gigawatts,
and so this project isn't going to have a huge
(05:14):
world changing impact on China's power sector, but it does
do a couple of different things that are going to
be really beneficial to China's attempt to clean up its
energy sector and will help China meet its energy transition
goals of peaking emissions by twenty thirty and then reaching
net zero emissions by twenty sixty.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
China still relies on coal power plants to back up
its more sustainable energy sources like solar and wind.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
Wind and solar, while cheap and wall abundant, only generate
when the wind blows, and it doesn't really allow them
to replace coal plants because at the end of the day,
you still need backup generation to make sure that when
there's a period where there's no sun out and the
wind stops, that people can still turn on their lights.
What hydropower does that when solar don't do is it's
(06:06):
what we call a dispatchable source. You can use it
when it's needed, you can hold it back when it's not. Now,
hydropower is not perfectly dispatchable, like if you're using a
fossil fuel power plant, a gas or a coal power plant,
you can really just sort of turn it off and
on as needed hydropower. There's still some external things like
whether there's a drought, if there's you know, too much water,
(06:29):
If there's rain, you know, you have to open the floodgates.
It's not perfect, but it is a clean power source
that allows the grid to be a little bit more
flexible in terms of, you know, generating when it's needed
and not just when the supply is available.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
That reliability and flexibility are just two of the reasons
why building a hydroelectric dam is so expensive. The Yarlung
Sungpo Dam will cost one hundred and sixty seven billion
dollars more than the International Space Day did, and Dan
says the power it generates will be several times more
(07:06):
expensive than any other energy source.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
If it ends up being about a segmenty gigawatt project,
as we expect it to be, you're talking about two
point four million dollars per megawatt. Now. That compares to
an onshore wind plant right now that China would spend
about six hundred thousand dollars per megawat on, or a
solar power plant that China would spend about four hundred
thousand dollars per megadon. China infrastructure projects never lack for lenders.
(07:32):
But this is not a white elephant. This is going
to be a hydropower project that sells a lot of electricity.
That electricity has value, and so they're going to be
able to code to their lenders and say, listen, over
twenty thirty years, we're going to make a ton of money,
and we're going to have the revenue to pay you back.
Speaker 2 (07:50):
Dan says, there's another reason the Chinese government has green
lit the project, and that's the state of China's economy.
Speaker 1 (07:59):
The way I think about it is this is less
of a hydropower project that's going to provide some economic
stimulus and more of an economic stimulus project that at
the end of the day will be able to produce
some hydropower. We're in this new sort of era where
China's economy has been stagnant since COVID people have been
waiting for a kind of stimulus boost to recover it.
(08:19):
Sectors like cement, like steel, like construction, those have been
particularly hard hurt by the burst of the property bubble,
and so you've got this perfect storm here where there's
this project that requires a lot of those materials that
used to be seen as maybe a little bit risky
and costly to do, but now it kind of fits
this dual need of both providing some economic stimulus for
(08:42):
some hurting sectors while also eventually providing a really, really
large source of clean energy.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
The project is estimated to generate two hundred thousand new
jobs and boost China's GDP every year for the next decade.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
They've estimated that it's likely bigger than multiple different monetary
policy actions that the Central Bank has taken over the
past few years, so it could really help reflate the
economy as they try to do their supply side reform
over the coming years.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
How China plans to transmit all that clean energy, and
what the dam's construction means for simmering tensions between Beijing
and New Delhi. That's after the break. China has been
(09:43):
talking about building a mega dam on the Yurlanngsungpur River
for decades, but construction was approved only in December last year.
Bloomberg Stan Mertor says that's largely because the challenges to
the project are so formidable.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
In past conversations I've had with people, they were a
little bit iffy on whether it would ever get built.
Because this is an incredibly remote site. It's very very
far away from any major population centers, and so you
have to transport millions of tons of cement and sand
and aggregate and tens of thousands of workers up to
this remote area.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
The project site is in a seismically active area. That
means engineers will need to ensure that the dam is
strong enough to withstand earthquakes. And then there's the question
of how to get the power generated by the dam
to the places that need it. Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong.
(10:43):
They're all thousands of miles away, which means this isn't
just one massive infrastructure project, it's two.
Speaker 1 (10:51):
Earlier this year, when China announced this project as part
of their work plan for this year, they not only
said we're going to try to develop hydropowered the is
Ensemble River, but they said we're going to try to
build a power line from Tibet to the Hong Kong,
guangzhosh and Jen Bay area to transmit some of that.
That itself is going to be a major undertaking. It's
going to require lots of copper and aluminum steel itself.
(11:13):
City Bank has estimated just the transmission alone could be
another seven hundred billion yuan about one hundred billion dollars,
and so that will also be a difficult thing.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
The domestic considerations in building this mega dam are considerable,
but they might be overshadowed by international complications. Downstream from
the site. The Yar Lungsangpu River flows into India and
then into Bangladesh and is critical to livelihoods in the region.
Speaker 1 (11:44):
When China first announced back in December that there was
going to go forward with this, the Indian government reach
out to the Chinese government. They raised alarm bells, an
Indian minister set in March. This was part of discussions
the countries had in January. The Chinese government clearly thinks
that they've told the Indian government the downstream areas won't
(12:04):
be affected, and they think that they've convinced Indian officials
that this is not a project that will harm the ties.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
The relationship between China and India has worsened in recent
years after a long history of border disputes in the
Himalian region.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
It is too early to say how this is going
to develop. Already, India has mooted building its own hydropower
station across the border from this plant where they would
be able to at least put in a little bit
of their own control over the flow of the water
and produce their own electricity.
Speaker 2 (12:41):
There's another complication. Tibet is a highly sensitive area. The
region has long endured intense social security and religious controls
under Beijing's policies, and though China has denied them, allegations
of mass labor systems and repression persist.
Speaker 1 (13:02):
Tibet is a politically sensitive area. It's been in the
sort of global crosshairs for decades. Tibet and the Beijing
government have a very long and fraught history, and you know, frankly,
as a foreign journalist, Tibet is an area that I'm
not allowed to visit.
Speaker 2 (13:21):
It's not just the political situation in Tibet. There are
significant concerns around the environmental implications as well.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
This is a really really fragile area. It's really unique there.
You know, you have this dry mountain air coming down
from the Himalayas meeting up with this humid, warm air
coming up from the Indian Ocean. It's one of the
most uniquely biodiverse spots in the world. And the idea
of bringing tens of thousands of workers. Plus However, many tens,
if not hundreds of thousands of more wolves will pop
(13:51):
up to create like the restaurants and food trucks and
bars and karaoke and stuff to service these people. The
idea that there's gonna be all of this human activity
in a place that's been remote for most of its history.
You hope for the best, but human history has not
been very kind to the planet Earth, and you just
have to wonder if they're going to be able to
(14:11):
rain in people from not damaging permanently. It's really eigue area.
Speaker 2 (14:21):
This is The Big Take Asia from Bloomberg News. I'm
mad A Kavoshi. To get more from The Big Take
and unlimited access to all of Bloomberg dot Com, subscribe
today at Bloomberg dot com slash podcast Offer. If you
liked the episode, make sure to subscribe and review The
Big Take Asia wherever you listen to podcasts. It helps
(14:44):
people find the show. Thanks for listening, See you next time.
Bloomberg Audio studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
Earlier this month, China officially started construction on a massive
hydropower dam in tibetan Yaoum. The dam, when completed, will
be the biggest power plant on the planet.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
It's three times bigger than the largest power plant in
the world right now. It's more than all of the
power plants in Poland combined.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
Dan Mortor covers the energy industry for Bloomberg from Beijing.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
The amount of cement their estimating their need it would
be enough to fill more than fifty Hoover dams, and
the amount of steel. It would be enough to build
one hundred and sixteen Empire state buildings.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
This mega project comes with a mega price stack one
hundred and sixty seven billion dollars.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
This would be one of the most expensive undertakings for
infrastructure in human history, more expensive than the International Space Station.
You're looking at decades long projects like building the US
Interstate Highway system before you get to comparable amounts of investment.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
China says the dam will provide a major source of
clean energy. More importantly, it will boost the country's slowing economy.
But the project carries huge engineering and environmental risks and
could strain relations with two of its neighbors, India and Bangladesh.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
The Indian government has been worried about if China was
able to build a dam, they would then be able
to use sort of water access as a pain point
if there was an eventual conflict between the countries. And
there's going to be all of this human activity in
a place that's been remote for most of its history.
You hope for the best, but human history has not
(01:52):
been very kind to the planet Earth, and you just
have to wonder if they're going to be able to
rain in people from not damaging that really area.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
This is the Big Take Asia from Bloomberg News. I'm
Mini Kadoshi filling in for one half every week. We
take you inside some of the world's biggest and most
powerful economies and the markets, tycoons and businesses that drive
this ever shifting region. Today on the show, China bats
(02:24):
big on a new mega dam, Why the project is
raising alarm with its neighbors, and what its construction could
mean for China's economy and its green energy ambitions. When
it comes to building hydro dams, China has got plenty
(02:47):
of experience. It operates two of the world's largest dams.
That includes the world's biggest hydro dam, Three Gorges, which
opened in central China in two thousand and nine. This
this new megadam will be built in Tibet, a mountainous
region just north of the border with India.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
It's in this bend on the Arlansangwo River that they
call like the Medor or Moto Gorge.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
And Bloomberg Energy reporter Dan Motor says the dam is
in an area that till recently was very difficult to
get to.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
It is a very, very very steep drop. The river
drops about two thousand meters over a fifty klometer stretch
as it curves and bends through the mountains of the Himalayas.
The county that it's at is up until twenty thirteen
didn't even have a highway that connected it. You'd have
to walk a day, you know, or take a donkey
or a horse to get to the river from the
(03:44):
closest highway.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
Most dams, like the Hoover Dam, block the path of
a river to create a reservoir. They then release the water,
which turns turbines and generates electricity. This Yar Lungsangpo Dam
is different.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
What they're trying to do here is a little bit
more audacious. The idea is to drill a tunnel through
the mountains down that steep, steep, steep gradient, and then
divert some of the water from going around that big
bend and instead go basically just vertically straight down the mountain.
That steep gradient that this river moves on really allows
(04:23):
you to get that water flowing at high enough speeds
to be able to run the turbines to generate the electricity.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
At the groundbreaking ceremony earlier this month, Chinese Premier Li
Chiang called the Yar Lungsanko Dam the project of the century.
State engineers have said it has the potential to generate
as much as seventy gigawatts of electricity. That's enough to
power the United Kingdom.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
It's three times bigger than the largest power plant in
the world right now. It is a national, country level
type of generating asset, but China's huge. China has about
four thousand gigawatts of total generating capacity right now. Its
peak demand is about one four hundred and fifty gigawatts,
and so this project isn't going to have a huge
(05:14):
world changing impact on China's power sector, but it does
do a couple of different things that are going to
be really beneficial to China's attempt to clean up its
energy sector and will help China meet its energy transition
goals of peaking emissions by twenty thirty and then reaching
net zero emissions by twenty sixty.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
China still relies on coal power plants to back up
its more sustainable energy sources like solar and wind.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
Wind and solar, while cheap and wall abundant, only generate
when the wind blows, and it doesn't really allow them
to replace coal plants because at the end of the day,
you still need backup generation to make sure that when
there's a period where there's no sun out and the
wind stops, that people can still turn on their lights.
What hydropower does that when solar don't do is it's
(06:06):
what we call a dispatchable source. You can use it
when it's needed, you can hold it back when it's not. Now,
hydropower is not perfectly dispatchable, like if you're using a
fossil fuel power plant, a gas or a coal power plant,
you can really just sort of turn it off and
on as needed hydropower. There's still some external things like
whether there's a drought, if there's you know, too much water,
(06:29):
If there's rain, you know, you have to open the floodgates.
It's not perfect, but it is a clean power source
that allows the grid to be a little bit more
flexible in terms of, you know, generating when it's needed
and not just when the supply is available.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
That reliability and flexibility are just two of the reasons
why building a hydroelectric dam is so expensive. The Yarlung
Sungpo Dam will cost one hundred and sixty seven billion
dollars more than the International Space Day did, and Dan
says the power it generates will be several times more
(07:06):
expensive than any other energy source.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
If it ends up being about a segmenty gigawatt project,
as we expect it to be, you're talking about two
point four million dollars per megawatt. Now. That compares to
an onshore wind plant right now that China would spend
about six hundred thousand dollars per megawat on, or a
solar power plant that China would spend about four hundred
thousand dollars per megadon. China infrastructure projects never lack for lenders.
(07:32):
But this is not a white elephant. This is going
to be a hydropower project that sells a lot of electricity.
That electricity has value, and so they're going to be
able to code to their lenders and say, listen, over
twenty thirty years, we're going to make a ton of money,
and we're going to have the revenue to pay you back.
Speaker 2 (07:50):
Dan says, there's another reason the Chinese government has green
lit the project, and that's the state of China's economy.
Speaker 1 (07:59):
The way I think about it is this is less
of a hydropower project that's going to provide some economic
stimulus and more of an economic stimulus project that at
the end of the day will be able to produce
some hydropower. We're in this new sort of era where
China's economy has been stagnant since COVID people have been
waiting for a kind of stimulus boost to recover it.
(08:19):
Sectors like cement, like steel, like construction, those have been
particularly hard hurt by the burst of the property bubble,
and so you've got this perfect storm here where there's
this project that requires a lot of those materials that
used to be seen as maybe a little bit risky
and costly to do, but now it kind of fits
this dual need of both providing some economic stimulus for
(08:42):
some hurting sectors while also eventually providing a really, really
large source of clean energy.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
The project is estimated to generate two hundred thousand new
jobs and boost China's GDP every year for the next decade.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
They've estimated that it's likely bigger than multiple different monetary
policy actions that the Central Bank has taken over the
past few years, so it could really help reflate the
economy as they try to do their supply side reform
over the coming years.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
How China plans to transmit all that clean energy, and
what the dam's construction means for simmering tensions between Beijing
and New Delhi. That's after the break. China has been
(09:43):
talking about building a mega dam on the Yurlanngsungpur River
for decades, but construction was approved only in December last year.
Bloomberg Stan Mertor says that's largely because the challenges to
the project are so formidable.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
In past conversations I've had with people, they were a
little bit iffy on whether it would ever get built.
Because this is an incredibly remote site. It's very very
far away from any major population centers, and so you
have to transport millions of tons of cement and sand
and aggregate and tens of thousands of workers up to
this remote area.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
The project site is in a seismically active area. That
means engineers will need to ensure that the dam is
strong enough to withstand earthquakes. And then there's the question
of how to get the power generated by the dam
to the places that need it. Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong.
(10:43):
They're all thousands of miles away, which means this isn't
just one massive infrastructure project, it's two.
Speaker 1 (10:51):
Earlier this year, when China announced this project as part
of their work plan for this year, they not only
said we're going to try to develop hydropowered the is
Ensemble River, but they said we're going to try to
build a power line from Tibet to the Hong Kong,
guangzhosh and Jen Bay area to transmit some of that.
That itself is going to be a major undertaking. It's
going to require lots of copper and aluminum steel itself.
(11:13):
City Bank has estimated just the transmission alone could be
another seven hundred billion yuan about one hundred billion dollars,
and so that will also be a difficult thing.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
The domestic considerations in building this mega dam are considerable,
but they might be overshadowed by international complications. Downstream from
the site. The Yar Lungsangpu River flows into India and
then into Bangladesh and is critical to livelihoods in the region.
Speaker 1 (11:44):
When China first announced back in December that there was
going to go forward with this, the Indian government reach
out to the Chinese government. They raised alarm bells, an
Indian minister set in March. This was part of discussions
the countries had in January. The Chinese government clearly thinks
that they've told the Indian government the downstream areas won't
(12:04):
be affected, and they think that they've convinced Indian officials
that this is not a project that will harm the ties.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
The relationship between China and India has worsened in recent
years after a long history of border disputes in the
Himalian region.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
It is too early to say how this is going
to develop. Already, India has mooted building its own hydropower
station across the border from this plant where they would
be able to at least put in a little bit
of their own control over the flow of the water
and produce their own electricity.
Speaker 2 (12:41):
There's another complication. Tibet is a highly sensitive area. The
region has long endured intense social security and religious controls
under Beijing's policies, and though China has denied them, allegations
of mass labor systems and repression persist.
Speaker 1 (13:02):
Tibet is a politically sensitive area. It's been in the
sort of global crosshairs for decades. Tibet and the Beijing
government have a very long and fraught history, and you know, frankly,
as a foreign journalist, Tibet is an area that I'm
not allowed to visit.
Speaker 2 (13:21):
It's not just the political situation in Tibet. There are
significant concerns around the environmental implications as well.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
This is a really really fragile area. It's really unique there.
You know, you have this dry mountain air coming down
from the Himalayas meeting up with this humid, warm air
coming up from the Indian Ocean. It's one of the
most uniquely biodiverse spots in the world. And the idea
of bringing tens of thousands of workers. Plus However, many tens,
if not hundreds of thousands of more wolves will pop
(13:51):
up to create like the restaurants and food trucks and
bars and karaoke and stuff to service these people. The
idea that there's gonna be all of this human activity
in a place that's been remote for most of its history.
You hope for the best, but human history has not
been very kind to the planet Earth, and you just
have to wonder if they're going to be able to
(14:11):
rain in people from not damaging permanently. It's really eigue area.
Speaker 2 (14:21):
This is The Big Take Asia from Bloomberg News. I'm
mad A Kavoshi. To get more from The Big Take
and unlimited access to all of Bloomberg dot Com, subscribe
today at Bloomberg dot com slash podcast Offer. If you
liked the episode, make sure to subscribe and review The
Big Take Asia wherever you listen to podcasts. It helps
(14:44):
people find the show. Thanks for listening, See you next time.
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