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Daily demand profiles in Thailand, showing load patterns shifting both daily and seasonally. EGAT (2004), reprinted in Parkboom and Harrison (2008, 1442).
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In 2010, the largest hydropower dam ever constructed in Laos, the Nam Theun 2 (NT2) Power Project, was completed with crucial—indeed, deal-making—support from the World Bank. Although the vast majority of the electricity produced by the project is exported to neighboring Thailand, the most important negative social and environmental impacts have oc...
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... and its adoption by the World Bank ensured “it had to be set in the overall development framework of Lao PDR, and the revenues generated by the project had to be used for poverty reduction” (Ahmad 2011, 99). NT2 thus did not only serve electricity system needs, it was “reframed as an engine for national development with major implications for national revenue management, environmental policy, and community development” (Ahmad 2011, 105). The most significant link, however, and what this article seeks to show, is that EGAT managers are using NT2 to supply variable and peak power for the Thai system. As detailed here, this was not fully revealed in initial plans for NT2 and the assessment of its downstream impacts but, post hoc, it can be inferred by linking Thai energy consumption patterns, changes to the XBF River, and the way this possibility was provided for in the project’s constituting documents. Bangkok is by far the largest city in Thailand and accounts for approximately one quarter of the country’s electricity demand. Thailand has a hot, humid climate and air conditioning and refrigera- tion—especially in its relatively prosperous central metropolis—is also a sign of modernity and urbaniza- tion as well as a key demand driver for electricity. Electricity demand from Bangkok air conditioning exceeds the total of output of NT2. Its use is highly variable given changes in daily temperature and the routinized opening and closing of businesses and offices through the day and week. Although there are other causes of varying electricity demand in the Thai electricity system, Bangkok air conditioning makes up an important node in the network and can be directly linked as contributing, through action at a distance, to changes in the XBF River. Air conditioning use varies in large part because of outside weather. Although the mean temperature in Thailand is 31 C, there is a wide annual range of 22 C to 39 C and corresponding shifts in total electricity demand. For instance, the peak demand during the hot season of 2004 exceeded the winter peak by around 4,500 MW (or 32 percent of system peak demand). Load patterns also shift with daily temperature changes, indicating the role of air conditioning and refrigeration (Figure 4; see Parkpoom and Harrison 2008, 1442). Data on consumption provide additional evidence of the role of Bangkok’s air conditioning in the greater Mekong system. Typically, air conditioning is responsible for 60 percent of electricity consumption in a commercial building (Chirarattananon and Taweekun 2003; Chirarattananon et al. 2010). In 2013, the MEA, the distribution company for Bangkok that EGAT supplies, delivered 13,762 GWh of electricity to businesses, and 7,387 GWh to small general service establishments (Ministry of Energy 2014). Large malls in Bangkok can have very large electricity demand for air conditioning. For example, in 2011 the huge Siam Paragon mall (see Figure 5) consumed 123 GWh of electricity—nearly twice as much as the northern Thai province of Mae Hong Son with a population of more than 250,000 (65 GWh) and almost as much as the northeastern Thai province of Mukdahan (128 GWh; Pasick 2015). Although air conditioning can vary as a percentage of total building load, from 59 percent for businesses to 71 percent for hotels (Yamtraipat et al. 2006), a figure of 60 percent gives an estimate of 8,258 GWh for businesses and 4,432 GWh for small general service establishments—much higher than the total yearly output of NT2. Moreover, typically large buildings in Thailand have very large variations in energy consumption—a department store with a load of 2.5 MW or an office with a 2.0 MW load might have little to no energy consumption at night but ramp up to full load use during business hours (Chirarattananon et al. 2010). This helps explain why Thailand’s peak consumption occurs in the early afternoon of the sun- niest days of the hot, dry season, as this peak is driven by air conditioning loads (Du Pont ...
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Between 2015 and 2016, Vietnamese Mekong Delta (VMD) has undergone the most severe drought event over the last 90 years, causing damages to agriculture, aquaculture, and fresh water suply. Moreover, upstream Mekong River development by constructing hydropower dams will magnify the severity to the region. This research therefore aims at summarizing...
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... The aim is to shed new light on the role and ambiguous qualities of China-made infrastructure in the shaping of political-ecological relations and socio-spatial formations in Cambodia and beyond. At the same time, this article bridges discussions on Mekong dams (Baird & Quastel, 2015;Blake & Barney, 2018;Geheb & Suhardiman, 2019;Mahanty et al., 2023;Middleton, 2022) with studies on the enclaved Mekong geographies (Laungaramsri, 2019;Nyíri, 2012;Rippa, 2019;Tan, 2017). ...
... In the Mekong Region, dams have been widely reported to diminish livelihood opportunities for those affected, along with their decision-making powers over river uses and their abilities to influence how dams are built and operated (e.g. Baird et al., 2015;Middleton, 2022;Suhardiman & Geheb, 2022;Ponce, 2022). Despite the similar effects of the large Mekong dams (Geheb & Suhardiman, 2019), the constitutive coalitions of actors and their interplay do shape the dam effects, making the implications of the forceful entry of Chinese actors into the international hydropower sector highly relevant to understanding current developments. ...
... A key, non-human force that dams entangle with is river flow. The 'volatile rivers' concept aims to capture the new unpredictability and unruliness of fluvial forces (Krause & Harris, 2021) largely produced by climate change and environmental engineering, and the increasing conditioning of the Mekong flow regimes of the dammed rivers by electricity markets in far-away urban centers (Baird & Quastel, 2015). The reworked ebbs and floods of the Mekong and its dammed mainstream and tributaries have resulted in more rapid and out-of-monsoon-season fluctuations, drastic changes in previous seasonal riverine affordances, and potential augmentation of climate change-induced unpredictability. ...
This article seeks to advance understanding of the changing interconnections between rivers, infrastructure, and power relations as well as how these are increasingly shaped by a globalizing China and climate change. To do so, it analyzes damming practices in Cambodia and their evolution under a post-neoliberal, concessionary governing mode that materializes in enclaves of corporate authority under Chinese state-owned enterprises. Drawing from the literature on the political life of Chinese overseas infrastructure projects, this article develops the idea of ambiguously entangled enclaves. The focus is on the four most recent large-scale dams in Cambodia and the kinds of dis/connections, altered hydrosocial relations, and power dynamics they generate. The article highlights patterns of dis/entanglement that illuminate the role of Chinese infrastructural engagement in shaping new political-ecological relations and socio-spatial formations in Cambodia and beyond. It also adds insights into the multidimensional geography of enclavism in the Mekong Region.
... However, as Baird and Quastel (2015) and Marks and Zhang (2019) have demonstrated, high demand for energy, especially for air conditioning in Bangkok, but also for industrial consumption, has led to serious ecological impacts on dammed rivers in Laos, indicating how distant demand for cheap energy is impacting more localized ecologies and livelihoods. ...
... One option is to apply an environmental flows approach to addressing the problem (Dyson, Bergkamp, and Scanlon 2003;Thomas 2007 Richter et al. 2010;Baird and Quastel 2015). However, this practice can be problematic in its own right. ...
On the Mekong River, north of Stung Treng town in northeastern Cambodia, and below the border with Laos, lies an area of riverine seasonally flooded forest designated as an internationally significant Ramsar wetland site because of its exceptional biodiversity and importance to livelihoods. This article reports on the cumulative and cascading impacts of numerous upstream hydropower dams in China and Laos on this vital ecosystem due to the release of water during the dry season, which prevents the flooded forest from undergoing its critically important drying out period. In particular, we investigate the damage being wrought on these flooded forests and on the various species dependent on them. Different species have been variously affected, but some have been largely destroyed. Others are being increasingly impacted. This habitat loss is negatively affecting fisheries, especially for a number of Pangasiidae catfish and Cyprinid carps, which is having an adverse effect on local livelihoods. New dams upriver, and continued high dry-season water from existing dams, are likely to lead eventually to the increased degradation and possibly the eradication of the flooded forests along the mainstream Mekong River, unless measures are taken to address the problem.
... While Lao hydropower export projects of the 1990s were supported by capital and expertise from the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank (Lebel et al., 2005;Mirumachi & Torriti, 2012) to support the Lao government's ambitions to become the "Battery of Southeast Asia", in the early 2000s the projects that were suspended with the onset of the 1997 Asian financial crisis were mostly taken on by Thai, Vietnamese and Chinese companies (Middleton, 2016), reflecting a shift in hydro-financing regimes (Souvannaseng, 2022). These developments are situated within the growing and powerful discourse of the waterenergy-food nexus (Hensengerth, 2015;Keskinen et al., 2015; and electricity governance, particularly in relation to Thailand's state utility Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand's (EGAT) role in driving power trade in the Lower Mekong Basin (see Baird & Quastel, 2015;Intralawan et al., 2018;Kaisti & Käkönen, 2012;Marks & Zhang, 2019;Middleton & Dore, 2015;Simpson, 2007;Tran & Suhardiman, 2020). ...
... also argue that applying an environmental justice lens towards understanding the water-energy-food nexus will place a stronger emphasis on identifying the winners and losers in natural resource decision making, and therefore has strong implications for addressing injustice in decision-making, law, and policy at multiple scales. The rescaling of electricity production through regional energy trading, especially between Thailand and Laos, is also intertwined with these transformations and the production of water injustices (Baird & Quastel, 2015;Barney & Souksakoun, 2021). Cross-sectoral cumulative impacts also arise when hydropower development intersects with sectors such as large-scale industrial plantations in the Mekong Region (Baird & Barney, 2017), and are heavily intertwined with the co-production of scale and injustice in the Mekong transboundary commons. ...
The transboundary Mekong River spans China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam, and provides critical ecosystem services that support millions of people across the river basin. However, the exploitation of its water resources for state‐led development, especially in the realm of hydropower development, not only threatens the livelihoods and food security of communities across the river basin, but also reveal the challenges of governing the Mekong River as a transboundary commons. In focusing on how environmental injustice is produced through hydropower development and the power dynamics within hybrid governance arrangements in the Mekong River Basin, this paper seeks to examine how a grounded perspective of environmental justice may be understood in this context by linkages between the principles of environmental justice and the Mekong literature in three ways. First, the production of, and challenges against distributive injustice in the Mekong River Basin must engage with a strong tradition of scalar analysis in the field of transboundary water governance, particularly in understanding how a politics of scale underlies contestations around the Mekong River. Second, the principle of justice as recognition can be situated within a body of literature that interrogates the politics of knowledge that runs through Mekong water governance, although the co‐production of knowledge types must be acknowledged. Finally, a recent body of literature questioning the legality of dam‐building and public participation around Mekong hydropower dams are closely tied to issues of procedural justice, and reveal the importance of recognizing plurality in ideas around transparency and accountability.
This article is categorized under: Human Water > Water Governance
Human Water > Water as Imagined and Represented
Human Water > Value of Water
... On one hand, the new concessionary dam assemblages in Laos and Cambodia cohere. They all generate corporate enclaves with dam controllers that maximize electricity sales and thus disrupt seasonal flow rhythms, related hydroecology, hydro-social relations, and livelihoods by generating erratic off-season flow patterns determined by peaks in daily, weekly, and seasonal electricity demand in faraway urban centres (mostly in Thailand in the case of Laos, and the domestic capital in Cambodia) (Baird & Quastel, 2015). On the other hand, the concessionary dams have attracted a wide range of agencies, and many aspects of dam governance thus differ as they depend on the composition of the assembled parties. ...
... There are also indications that the profit-maximizing damoperation mode may exacerbate exceptional floods, of which the devastating flood of 2011 provides an example. While the hydropower company denies responsibility and claims that it refrained from releasing water when the river had reached the maximum level, at which the company is obliged to shut off water discharges, it remains possible that the dam-operation mode added to the intensity and duration of the flooding (Baird & Quastel, 2015). Interviewed Laos-based experts suggested that other dams have resorted to similarly harmful emergency releases, although confirmed evidence is lacking because dam-related public discussions are sanctioned. ...
This article explores continuities and changes in the damming of rivers in the global South. By the 2000s, the infrastructural promises of large dams seemed exhausted. Yet, currently dams are making a strong comeback with new justifications highlighting their capacity to produce low-carbon energy and climate-proofed waterscapes, while the harms they generate are being presented as fixable. Through cases from the Mekong (Laos and Cambodia), and the Grijalva (Mexico) River Basins, we problematize these claims. Despite changes in the aspirations and agencies that foster damming, obdurate dam materialities and the new profit-maximizing operation modes provoke violent continuities of infrastructural harms and hinder the repurposing of dams to serve climate combat. Neoliberalised dams even augment climate vulnerabilities, as the more volatile rivers increasingly exceed their ordering capacities. We also show how the new dam assemblages continue dispossessing riverine residents while divergently strengthening corporate and state powers and obscuring relations of responsibility.
... Muchas de estas políticas han resultado en procesos de acumulación a través de la privatización de los ríos y el sector energético. Tal es el caso de Turquía (Eren, 2017) y Laos (Baird y Quastel, 2015) donde el Estado, a través de un nuevo régimen regulatorio no sólo promovió acuerdos comerciales, sino que pasó a privatizar su gestión. En ese sentido, el desarrollo de proyectos HE se encuentra asociado con el proceso de neoliberalización de la naturaleza y especialmente del agua. ...
... En el estudio de estos procesos de acumulación de HE, varios autores (Baird y Quastel, 2015;Romero-Toledo et al., 2009), concluyen que el mercado está imposibilitado para resolver los conflictos socioambientales. Después de que los proyectos son construidos, afectan de manera negativa tanto a los ríos como a los pobladores de las aldeas ribereñas, lo cual termina desafiando la idea de que los problemas socioambientales pueden manejarse por medio del mercado y de acuerdos comerciales calculados. ...
El objetivo de este trabajo consiste en señalar los avances en los estudios de la ecología política sobre hidroeléctricas. Para ello se utilizó una metodología de revisión sistemática de literatura científica, dando como resultado importantes reflexiones sobre cuatro temáticas: los procesos de acumulación ligados al desarrollo de proyectos hidroeléctricos; conflictos socioambientales originados en las disputas por territorios rurales; mecanismos de resistencia de las comunidades rurales afectadas; y la gobernanza institucional para gestionar los conflictos. Se concluye que es necesario atender a las inequidades territoriales que tienen origen estructural, las cuales se profundizan a raíz de la implementación de proyectos hidroeléctricos.
... Telecoupling can connect urban to rural spaces, but also potentially rural to rural spaces or urban to urban spaces (Baird & Fox, 2015;Fox et al., 2018). These connections across space can also be connected through adopting more general political ecology approaches, which is what Baird & Quastel (2015) and later Marks & Zhang (2019) do when considering energy transfers from hydropower dams in Laos to the heavy energy consuming Bangkok. Moreover, Baird et al. (2019) assess the connections between Vietnamese labor on rubber plantations in Laos, rather than explicitly adopting an urban-rural approach, or a telecoupling approach, but instead examine the connections through adopting less of this limiting language. ...
Geographers have been challenging problematic spatial concepts for decades. Gillen et al. usefully add to this work by disrupting the urban–rural binary in human geography, suggesting that we take people in the Global South more seriously, especially those ‘whose perspectives on urbanization are entangled with ongoing rural dynamics’. They advocate for advancing the concept of relational ruralization. In this commentary, I express my general support for Gillen et al.'s efforts to expose the limitations associated with the urban–rural divide. However, I go somewhat beyond their work to suggest that human geographers should consciously reduce the primacy of the urban–rural binary when conceptualizing space, especially when looking at activities that transcend the urban–rural. There are more productive ways to consider connections.
... ) _____ 46 Figure 24: Indonesia -Malaysia transmission line (Source: (Hashim, 2015)) ____________________________ 47 Figure (Fairley, 2017)) _______________ 58 Figure 33: Myanmar's installed electricity generating capacity (2010 -2018) (Source: (Moore, 2020)) _______ 59 Figure 34: Generation by type in New Zealand (1975Zealand ( -2017 Source: (Philpott et al., 2019) _______________ 61 Figure 35: New Zealand's main generators, transmission lines, and maximum loads in 2017 (Source: (Philpott et al., 2019)) _________________________________________________________________________________ 63 Figure 36: Installed electricity generating capacity in Papua New Guinea (2009Guinea ( -2018 (Clarke et al., 2018)) _____________________ 71 Figure 42: ROK: Energy Policy and renewables share of power generation (1988 -2016) (Source: (Park and Kim, 2019)) ____________________________________________________________________________________ 72 Figure 43: Main components of the ROK electricity grid (red dots indicate generators, and blue dots indicate substations) (Source: (Eisenberg et al., 2017)) ____________________________________________________ 73 Figure (Baird and Quastel, 2015)) ____________________________________________________________________________ 81 Figure 51: Comparative share of domestically produced energy in The Philippines (Data from (Posadas, 2017)) _________________________________________________________________________________________ 82 Figure (Gerner et al., 2017)) ______________________ 87 Figure 59: Viet Nam's electrical power generating capacity and sources projected to 2030(as per Viet Nam's PDP 7 (2011, with projections to 2030(Source: (Vu et al., 2019) ______________________________ 88 Table 2: PSH in the APEC economies (existing, planned and potential) ________________________ 9 Table 3: Main Electrical Energy Storage Systems (ESS) (Source: (EMA (Singapore), 2018, p. 7)) ____ 14 Table 4: Efficiency, flexibility and costs associated with different electrical storage options (Source: (Berre, 2016)) ___________________________________________________________________ 14 Table 5: Cost estimates for PSH (Source: (Mongird et al., 2020) ____________________________ 18 Table 6: Financing mechanisms for PSH (Source: (Saporiti, 2021)) __________________________ 19 Table 7: Challenges and opportunities for PSH _________________________________________ 23 (2020), separated by grid (Source: (Díaz et al., 2020)) 38 Table 11: Hong Kong fuel power mix (Source: (ENB (HK), 2020)) ____________________________ 42 ...
... Thailand has cross-border electricity transmission links in five places with Lao PDR, in two places with Cambodia, in one place with Malaysia and in one place with Myanmar (planned completion date of 2016) (ASEAN Secretariat, 2011; Baird and Quastel, 2015). ...
Variable renewable generators, such as wind and solar, require electrical energy storage systems because the electricity they supply is not adjustable based on demand. With the cost of renewable-based electricity generation reducing below fossil fuel-based generation, the issue of electrical energy storage is becoming increasingly important to allow for grid stability with increasing penetration of these variable generation sources.
This report includes background summaries for APEC economies plus additional Mekong Basin states and the information and synthesis for the APEC workshop on pumped storage hydropower that was held in 2021. The report highlights trends and potential for pumped storage hydropower (PSH) in the APEC economies. The rationale for the focus on PSH is that it is the most mature and economically proven large-scale electricity storage option.
... HYDROPOWER DEVELOPMENT IN THE MEKONG AND THE PAK BENG DAM Since the development of the first hydropower dam in the Mekong (Thailand's 25.2 MW Ubol Ratana dam), hydropower in the lowerMekong has developed rapidly(Baird & Quastel, 2015;Geheb & Suhardiman, 2019;Jusi, 2006;Middleton et al., 2009), growing from an installed capacity of just 31 MW in 1965, to over 33,000 MW in 2019 (Figure 1). Highest growth has been in China, Laos, and Vietnam. ...
Hydropower development in the lower Mekong Basin is being rapidly developed. Taking the Pak Beng hydropower project in Laos as a case study, this paper looks at participation and politics in transboundary hydropower development, how the latter is revealed by multiple, parallel institutional architectures in hydropower decision-making across scales, and its implications for transboundary environmental governance. We look at the institutional disjuncture in hydropower decision-making, how it is (re)produced by powerful, albeit conflicting narratives at respectively national and transboundary levels, power relations shaping these narratives, and how these translate into local community's limited ability to convey their voices and represent their development needs. Conceptually, the paper sheds light on the underlying politics in transboundary environmental governance by bringing to light the structural factors that prevent participation, including how these factors are justified, sustained and to a certain extent reproduced as an integral part of legal, policy, and institutional landscapes that govern hydropower decision-making across scales (e.g., local to transboundary).
... Hydropower is not a new source of energy and has been extensively studied in geography and political ecology. Critical scholars have studied the production of narratives (of modernity, nationalism, development, and, more recently, clean energy) used to justify projects (Desbiens, 2013;Harris and Alatout, 2010;Huber and Joshi, 2015;Kaika, 2006), as well the conflicts that emerge over the unequal distribution of benefits and costs associated with such projects (Baird and Quastel, 2015;Bratman, 2015;Finley-Brook and Thomas, 2010;Lord, 2016;Menon, 2019;Sneddon and Fox, 2008). However, as the urgency to reduce greenhouse gas emissions moves international consensus away from fossil fuels and towards renewable sources, hydropower is witnessing a resurgence as a clean energy source that would allow (developing) countries to meet their growing energy demands as well as provide flexibility to the grid for the integration of intermittent wind and solar capacity. ...
Despite a decades long push to develop what is seen as the vast untapped hydropower potential of the Indian Himalayas, hydropower capacity addition has been delayed and become increasingly expensive in India. Policy documents cite “poor” geology as a major reason for these delays. As hydropower in the form of run-of-river projects expand into the Himalayas, their construction activities encounter poor geology more frequently. This paper analyses hydropower development as an assemblage and examines how risk, especially geological risk, is negotiated to allow hydropower development to continue in the Indian Himalayas. We show how the category of “geological surprises” emerges as an institutional response to the problems of run-of-river based hydropower development in a seismically vulnerable landscape. We further show how “geological surprises” act as a boundary object between hydropower policy, project development, infrastructural finance, and hydropower knowledge, allowing for cooperation and negotiation, to allow hydropower development to continue in the geologically complex Himalayas.
... Experience from cases In the Lower Mekong River Basin, the four riparian states (Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam), driven by concerns of transboundary impacts, have jointly undertaken a series of multi-year assessment and planning activities to support the development of water resources for food and energy production. In the ensuing deliberations, a common, scalar strategy of hydropower development proponents has been to scale up the benefits of particular projects to the region, and scale down the area adversely affected, for instance, to just the reservoir area (Lebel et al. 2005;Baird and Quastel 2015). Thus, proponents celebrate that most of the electricity produced by a dam in Laos is destined for export to Vietnam and Thailand. ...
... Scalar strategies are also apparent with respect to temporal scales. Hydropower proponents, for instance, dismiss the flow impacts of catering to daily and day of the week peaks in electricity consumption, whereas those with riverbank gardens and fishers bemoan the disruption of their livelihoods from 'unnatural' flow fluctuations (Cochrane et al. 2014;Baird and Quastel 2015). At the seasonal level, hydropower dam operations tend to increase dry season flows-euphemistically called 'new water'-while reducing the seasonal flood pulse important to the productivity of fisheries (Baran and Myschowoda 2009;Keskinen et al. 2015). ...
The notion of a water–energy–food (WEF) nexus was introduced to encourage a more holistic perspective on the sustainable development of natural resources. Most attention has been directed at identifying potential synergies and trade-offs among sectors that could be addressed with improved technologies and management. The governance of the WEF nexus more broadly has received comparatively little attention, and the importance of scale in space and time has been largely ignored. Inspired by scholarship on multi-level governance in individual sectors, this paper identifies four scale-related governance challenges in the WEF nexus, namely: (1) scalar fit, which arises when planning and operating procedures work at different levels along the scales of space and time in different sectors; (2) scalar strategies, wherever the levels at which actors have influence and in which action takes place are contested and negotiated; (3) institutional interplay, where rules and norms in different sectors influence each other at different levels; (4) scalar uncertainty, arising out of the complexity of multi-level and multi-scale interactions. The relevance of these four challenges is illustrated with case studies from developed and developing countries. These examples show the importance of considering multiple levels and scales when assessing the likely effectiveness of WEF nexus governance mechanisms or proposals. The cases underline the need to pay close attention to issues of power, contestation, and negotiation, in addition to the analysis of institutional design. Thus, this paper recommends that nexus governance efforts and proposals be scrutinized for scale assumptions. The four identified challenges offer a suitable starting point for diagnosis.
Pahl-Wostl, C., Gorris, P., Jager, N. et al. Scale-related governance challenges in the water–energy–food nexus: toward a diagnostic approach. Sustain Sci (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-020-00888-6
