I spent a couple years on a motorbike traveling all through Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos (15k+ kms). Water mostly flows from the north (China) to the south in that region. The Mekong River.
China and Vietnam have dammed up nearly all of the large rivers in those three countries, for hydro. There are countless projects constantly being built as well. The scale is pretty epic really. Vietnam has some of the largest number of hydro dams in the world.
Downstream, there are huge swaths of empty riverbeds. In the wet season, when the rains overflow the dams, there are major floods and people who have built too close to the river edge, get swept away.
Hydro certainly is green, but the effect it has on everything downstream, isn't. Especially when it is poorly managed by countries that don't really have very much ecosense. They claim they are removing dams. I've seen it, they aren't... if anything they are just building more.
Properly managed hydro should help prevent flooding, which I imagine is incredibly valuable in an area with annual monsoon season. It's not like overflowing reservoirs are adding water to the watershed, it just means they don't yet have the in built capacity or were mismanaged, ie monsoon season arrived without sufficient capacity to absorb it, to prevent the natural flooding that was already occurring.
Yeah, the biggest problems are political, when one country controls the upstream flow. (The same issue comes up between States in the U.S.) Luckily for Smil in Manitoba this isn't an issue.
China and Vietnam have dammed up nearly all of the large rivers in those three countries, for hydro. There are countless projects constantly being built as well. The scale is pretty epic really. Vietnam has some of the largest number of hydro dams in the world.
Downstream, there are huge swaths of empty riverbeds. In the wet season, when the rains overflow the dams, there are major floods and people who have built too close to the river edge, get swept away.
Hydro certainly is green, but the effect it has on everything downstream, isn't. Especially when it is poorly managed by countries that don't really have very much ecosense. They claim they are removing dams. I've seen it, they aren't... if anything they are just building more.
https://www.hydropower.org/country-profiles/vietnam