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Nam Theun 2 voted top hydropower project
Nam Theun 2 has been voted the top Hydroelectric Power Project of the year 2011 in a Global Energy Magazine poll.
The poll results were announced on the magazine's website, revealing that its readers, most of them managers from top international energy companies, voted the Nam Theun 2 hydroelectric power project in central Laos as the number one hydroelectric power project in the 15-category renewable energy section.
The selection of the award winners was based on votes polled in the magazine's online survey, which opened in January this year. More than 1,100 professionals from over 700 companies spanning 73 different countries, nominated the winning projects.
The magazine is one of the leading publications in the energy industry and focuses on all areas of the business, including oil and gas, coal, nuclear power, renewable energy, power and utilities and the transport sectors.
More than four-fifths of subscribers hold senior positions including CEOs, presidents, vice-presidents and executive directors of the energy companies.
The Nam Theun 2 hydroelectric project is an industrial and development investment owned by private shareholders and the Lao government, backed by commercial lenders and international financial institutions including the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank.
The US$1.4 billion power plant project commenced construction in 2005 and began commercial operations in 2010.
The project's industrial potential comes from a gift of nature: the abundant water on the Nakai Plateau in Khammuan province, central Laos, and the 350 metre height difference between the Plateau and the Gnommalath plain below.
The power of this water, channelled down a tunnel drilled through the karst mountain, can generate an average 6,000 GWh of electricity per year. The majority of this electricity is exported to Thailand, earning the government an average US$80 million per year over the first 25 years of the project's operations.
The government described the project as “an essential part of the country's development framework that is likely to provide the first real possibility for Laos to gradually reduce its dependence on Official Development Assistance.”
This revenue will allow the government to fund poverty reduction efforts not just in Khammuan, but across the whole country.
Nam Theun 2 has been designed to incorporate a complete set of economic, environmental and social programmes to mitigate its effects on local people and ecosystems, and to improve living standards across the project area.
These programmes cover catchments, reservoir and downstream areas, and have been designed in consultation with local villagers, under international guidelines and recommendations from various international financial institutions.
vientiane times
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