The Three Gorges Dam (Part 4)

There’s a lot of things that I don’t agree with when China is talked about. The political situation is not as democratic as we are in the West. Their human rights record at home, and in foreign Countries also leaves a lot for us to question them on. What we need to take into account is the physical size of the humanity in China. There are 1.3 Billion people in that Country, four and a half times the population of the US, and nearly sixty times that of Australia. I just cannot imagine how a Country that size can be run.
Unlike those of us who live in the West, everyday life in China for the bulk of that humanity is at a level we would only call subsistence. In the main, every one of us in the West has access to a constant and reliable source of electrical power, while in China, only one family in six or seven has access to any electricity at all, let alone a reliable source, and most outside of the major cities have never had access to any electricity at all.
To that end China is constructing power plants on a scale unheard of, and plants of every variety. Most of that electrical power, in fact 80% of it, is being directed to industry, as China strives to bring itself to a standard of living we have had for generations. In the West, only 62 to 65 percent of total generated power is directed to Industry, so China is concentrating their efforts to get Industry up and running first and the rest will follow from that.

To that end, this huge project was put to construction. It has a long history, and has been in different forms of planning for 90 years. The hydro electric capability is probably only a recent addition, but one that will have a welcome benefit.

We in the West will point at the project and call it an environmental disaster of mammoth proportions, but the main reason for construction, that of flood mitigation, will actually ease the effects of the huge disaster a flood on this River will cause.

The hydro electric capability of this project makes it the largest on the Planet and as much as we call this an environmental disaster, there are benefits that place this project on the plus side when it comes to the environment, and I’d like to concentrate on some of them.

This project has a nameplate capacity of 22,500MW and pumps 100TerraWattHours of electricity into the Chinese grid, this amount actually equal to 2.5% of the total electricity produced in whole of the US.
That nameplate capacity is equal to 10 huge coal fired power plants, so that will be the area I will concentrate on.

When you look at the construction of a coal fired power plant, the turbine and generator part of the overall structure is far more complex than for this hydro plant. Regular maintenance on the generator would be similar for both types of plant, but a greater complexity in the turbine part means that there is more that can go wrong with a coal fired plant than for a hydro plant.

However the greatest saving is in what actually drives the turbine.
For a hydro plant, all you need is water, and with a dam this size on this, the third longest river on Earth, that driving force of the water is something that will never become a problem of any sort. For a Coal fired plant, it actually needs to be sited close to an assured source of water.
With a hydro plant, the water drives down the tunnel and then drives the Francis turbine, and then is released straight back into the downstream side of the river.
As an example, I will compare this to the Hoover Dam, opened in 1935. All the water from the Colorado passes through the hydro turbines, and the spillway has had almost no use from the opening day, even during the huge flood season of 1983 .

With a coal fired plant however, the water has to be boiled in the furnace/boiler and then continuously recycled through the three stages of the turbine, some of that water actually vaporising off as the clouds of steam you see above those fat stacks. The hot water cannot be released back into the river until it has cooled, after that continual recycling.

Now that boiling of the water is where I want to concentrate.
Hydro electric power is said to be cheaper and greener than other means of production. Even though as consumers, you pay around the same average price for the electricity you use, that is because you consume from the grid, and all sources of power generation contribute to that grid. The cheaper part of it comes in from the generation end of that grid. Power produced from hydro means is sold to the grid more cheaply than from other sources, and here is why.
The main cost of the hydro power comes from the original construction of the dam, and that is why those large coal fired plants are among the cheapest to actually construct.
What is not really mentioned is that after construction of the dam, and the power plants associated with it, there are only ongoing maintenance costs. However, with coal fired plants, there is the further added cost of actually purchasing and transporting the coal to the plant, and that is no small cost, because those large plants consume on average 10,000 tons of coal per day, and as an example only, I’ll mention the Bruce Mansfield coal fired plant in Pennsylvania which has an annual usage of coal of 6.5 million tons. This ongoing cost adds to the total cost of the production of power from those plants.

Referring this back to the Three Gorges Project, this plant produces the same power as ten of those large coal fired plants. Here, I’ll only be mentioning the actual cost of the coal itself, and keep in mind transporting it to the coal fired plants will be a further cost on top of those costs I mention here. Averaging out coal usage for an equivalent ten coal fired plants at 5 million tons, then that means this project does not have to buy 50 million tons of coal. The current price for top grade steaming coal for power plants runs at close on $125 per ton, so the saving here amounts to $6.25 Billion each year. It is brought into sharper relief over the life of the plant.
The average life span of a large coal fired plant is 50 years, so the savings over the life of the plant now amount to nearly $315 Billion. Keep in mind also that a hydro plant also has a longer life, and as a reference, I’ll use the example of the Hoover Dam, which has been providing hydro power now for 73 years. Realistically, a hydro plant of the scale of Three Gorges might run for a hundred years, which effectively doubles that original saving to $630 Billion, and the construction after 50 years of ten more coal fired plants, probably in itself an addition of a further $50 Billion.
So, now the economic value of this project is brought into stark relief. When you also take into account the fact that on this same Yangtze River, China is planning over the next ten to fifteen years to bring on line a further 5 large projects that will add a further twice this amount of power from the Three Gorges, that amount now balloons out to a saving of nearly $2 Trillion, and that is just for the coal to burn in the furnaces of equivalent coal fired plants. Another thing to keep in mind is that these monster plants in China will have paid for themselves within ten years, so the only outlay after that is for the maintenance of the generators, the turbines, and the transmission processes, which would also apply for the equivalent coal fired plants.

As for the green part of the power, environmentalists might say that construction of a dam on this scale is environmental vandalism on a huge scale. However, just turn your eyes for a moment and look at the Hoover Dam itself. Lake Mead backing up behind the Dam is a haven for numerous things in life that don’t amount to disaster. It is a tourist resort, there is fishing and boating, and it’s in vast parklands accessible to everybody. The lake itself has actually produced other benefits, and the same will apply with the Three Gorges, and on a much larger scale. The benefits to the Chinese people will be many and all of them good. River transport will become accessible to larger vessels, now up to 10,000 tons, so more consumer goods can be brought further up river than was the case before. People will be needed for the jobs from industry that will gear up around the lake. There will finally be access to electricity, and there will be more benefits than just these few.

However, the real green savings here relate directly back to the coal itself. Those of you living in an area where there is a large coal fired plant might attest that is not a desirably clean environment to be living in, whilst here at the Three Gorges, the air will always be pristine. No smoke coming out of ugly tall thin stacks, no clouds of steam pouring from the fatter stacks, and no emission of carbon dioxide greenhouse gas.
Looking at that CO2 emission, this huge project effectively replaces ten large coal fired plants. They will burn 50 million tons of coal each year for up to 50 years. As each ton of coal is burnt, it produces 2.86 tons of CO2, so each year, this amounts to an emission of CO2 in the amount of 145 million tons of that greenhouse gas each year, and over the 50 year life span of the coal fired plants, this then amounts to 7.3 billion tons of CO2 not being released into the environment, and the math for the remainder now becomes academic.

No, this hydro power at the Three Gorges Project cannot be viewed as environmental vandalism at all, when this is now taken into account.

The Chinese may have a lot a lot of things we may not agree with, but something like this should not be one of them. What it might make us do is to sit back and actually come to the realisation that on this front, they actually do have some vision for their future, and then they have proceeded to go out and actually do it.
Think carefully. Would a project of this scale have the chance of a snowball in hell of getting out of the planning stage in the US?

No!

Environmentalists will always demand that those Rivers must run free, and they will lobby politicians to can any project on a scale like this. Another thing that also needs to be taken into account is this. On the whole of Planet Earth, there are very few large hydro electric plants in planning or under construction. Of 25 large plants of 2000MW nameplate capacity or more currently in planning and construction, 20 of them are in China alone, and not one is planned for the US, and none have been for decades now. Those 20 projects just in China alone will produce nameplate capacity of 73,000MW, the equivalent of 37 Large Coal fired or nuclear powered plants, not counting this huge project in with those.

Think then of this. This project, and the others already in planning, just on this River Yangtze alone, will replace 30 huge coal fired plants, and when taken in context with the requirements of the Kyoto Protocol, this would go nearly three quarters of the way towards complete compliance if these plants were in the US.

So, even though China is constructing coal fired plants like there is no tomorrow, they actually are finding ways to take the environment into consideration, and this engineering marvel of the Three Gorges Dam is one of those.