Even while aiming to go carbon neutral by 2060, China is aiming to shut down up to hydropower plants, many too small or old to be useful now.
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Many dams in the country are too small to generate meaningful amounts of power. Others have simply become redundant as their rivers ran dry, their reservoirs silted up or they were superseded by dams built upstream. Moshikou never officially ceased operation. It just gradually stopped generating power, a victim of worsening droughts in the north of the country and increasing demands on its waters from towns and villages upstream that built hundreds of barriers to harvest its water.
Last year, the government blocked the only access route to the dam for"virus prevention.” The structure had been attracting social media pundits who compared it with the Hoover Dam in doomsday movies. Large dams and their reservoirs are also increasingly criticised for environmental damage. They alter the flow of rivers, submerge habitats and disrupt the migration and spawning of fish.
In 2018, after Xi visited the Yangtze region and Qinling mountains in the northwest and called for better environmental protection, a national campaign was launched to remove or improve 40,000 small hydro stations. Zhouzhi county in Shaanxi province in the northwest owes over 100 million yuan to a company that agreed to demolish three hydro stations. The county’s revenue for the first half of 2020 was only 135 million yuan, and it has another 26 hydro plants that need to be removed. In many places, due to the costs of demolition, only the hydroelectric turbines have been removed. The dams remain.
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