What did the Three Gorges Dam really cost?

The real cost of the Three Gorges Dam was the forced relocation of roughly 1.4 million residents from ancestral land along the Yangtze, the permanent drowning of large numbers of historical and archaeological sites, and over 200 billion yuan (about USD 30 billion) across a 17-year construction programme. What it bought is 22.5 GW of capacity and roughly 88–100 TWh of clean electricity a year.

Start with the scale of the works. The dam stands at Yichang in Hubei province: 185 metres high, 2,309 metres along the crest, holding 39.3 billion cubic metres, with a design head of roughly 80 to 113 metres and a maximum turbine discharge near 46,000 cubic metres per second. Its 22.5 GW comes from 32 Francis units of 700 MW each, all grid-connected by 2012. Annual output averages some 88 to 100 TWh — the equivalent of burning 50 million tonnes of coal, and about 100 million tonnes of CO2 avoided each year.

The resettlement figure deserves to be dwelt on. Around 1.4 million residents were forced to leave land their families had occupied for generations along both banks of the Yangtze, many resettled at sites hundreds of kilometres away in other provinces, where cultural rupture and problems of social adaptation have still not been fully resolved. Many historical sites along the gorges — including Three Kingdoms cultural sites and a large body of archaeological treasure — are permanently underwater. Set beside 22.5 GW and nearly a hundred billion kilowatt-hours a year of clean power, that figure of 1.4 million is a measure that should not be swallowed up.

The financial and temporal costs are equally concrete. Construction formally began in 1994 and took 17 years, with total investment exceeding 200 billion yuan, about USD 30 billion. Debate inside China over the project has never stopped — but the works are there now, the clean electricity produced each year is real, and so is the price paid by those who were moved. History does not deal in counterfactuals.

This is not an isolated ledger but the general accounting of the dam-building age. The Itaipu Dam on the Brazil–Paraguay border, completed in 1984 with 14 GW of capacity, displaced roughly 40,000 households — some 200,000 people — during construction, and the celebrated Guaira Falls vanished from the Earth beneath the reservoir. The Hoover Dam, built between 1931 and 1936 at 221 metres and 2.08 GW, was once the emblem of technological optimism; yet Lake Mead behind it fell to a record low in 2022, holding less than 25% of its historical maximum, and below roughly 320 metres of elevation the plant faces the 'dead pool' threshold at which its turbines can no longer be guaranteed to run.

Set beside 22.5 gigawatts and nearly a hundred billion kilowatt-hours a year of clean power, the figure of 1.4 million is a measure that must not be swallowed up.

This question is covered in depth in The Full Spectrum Every Energy Source Explained — A Singapore Perspective，第九章 9.3