Water rushes through O’Porng Morn Kraom , a minor tributary to the Mekong River in Cambodia’s northeastern province of Stung Treng. The water passes through the rotating turbines of a hand-made micro-hydropower dam, 1 of 2 built by the Lounh family for Koh Sampeay village. Before the arrival of the main grid, nearby application poles transferred the energy generated by the dam to dozens of town homes and the countryside community’s local pagoda.
As being a countries, including the U. S, appear to be phasing out new hydropower projects, the Empire is considering continuing to invest in the field. The Lounh family dam is a smaller counterpart to the ambitious mega-dams on the Mekong mainstream, which transmission progress in the Kingdom’s goal of country-wide access to electricity simply by 2023. Cambodian Excellent Minister Hun Sen stressed the importance of hydropower dams as a steady power source in a July speech in which he announced the country would certainly buck the trend of rising energy charges, exacerbated by the conflict in Eastern Europe.
But O’Porng Morn Kraom’s peaceful babble flows against a backdrop associated with debate over the sensitive balance between rural development and environment protection. While some companies see small-scale hydropower as the key electrifying rural communities, specialists have voiced problems over a basin-wide boom in dam advancement l and proliferation’s potential repercussions in the river’s rich ecosystem and biodiversity.
“What hydropower development does adversely to rivers, whatever the size, is it changes the function of how water moves, ” said Andrew Fisk, executive director of the Connecticut River Conservancy in the United States.
Globe’s Anton L. Delgado and Nasa Drop travelled to the web site of the Lounh dam to understand the potential effect of small-scale dams on the Mekong River.
Introduction by Amanda Oon
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