Chinese Big Projects Suck
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China’s Global Mega-Projects Are Falling Apart
Many of China’s Belt and Road infrastructure projects are plagued with construction flaws, including a giant hydropower plant in Ecuador, adding more costs to a program criticized for leading countries deeper into debt
Today, thousands of cracks have emerged in the $2.7 billion Coca Codo Sinclair hydroelectric plant, government engineers said, raising concerns that Ecuador’s biggest source of power could break down. At the same time, the Coca River’s mountainous slopes are eroding, threatening to damage the dam.
“We could lose everything,” said Fabricio Yépez, an engineer at the University of San Francisco in Quito who has closely tracked the project’s problems. “And we don’t know if it could be tomorrow or in six months.”
It is one of many Chinese-financed projects around the world plagued with construction flaws.
Now, low-quality construction on some of the projects risks crippling key infrastructure and saddling nations with even more costs for years to come as they try to remedy problems.
“We are suffering today because of the bad quality of equipment and parts” in Chinese-built projects, said René Ortiz, Ecuador’s former energy minister and ex-secretary general of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries.
In Pakistan, officials shut down the Neelum-Jhelum hydroelectric plant last year after detecting cracks in a tunnel that transports water through a mountain to drive a turbine.
The head of the country’s electricity regulator, Tauseef Farooqui, told Pakistan’s senate in November that he was concerned the tunnel could collapse just four years after the 969-megawatt plant became operational. That would be disastrous for a nation that has been battered by rising energy prices, said Mr. Farooqui. The closure of the plant has already cost Pakistan about $44 million a month in higher power costs since July, according to the regulator.
Hydropower plants can have operating lives of up to 100 years, according to the World Bank.
Uganda’s power generation company said it has identified more than 500 construction defects in a Chinese-built 183-megawatt hydropower plant on the Nile river that has suffered frequent breakdowns since it went into operation in 2019. China International Water & Electric Corp., which led construction of the Isimba Hydro Power Plant, failed to build a floating boom to protect the dam from water weeds and other debris, which has led to clogged turbines and power outages, according to the Uganda Electricity Generation Co., or UEGC.
The list goes on and on.
Now, everyone here who thinks that Chinese construction standards were better when they built the Three Gorges Dam raise your hand.
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I wonder if it’s design, construction, project management. Maybe a combination of all three. The first thing that comes to mind is that local labor had to be utilized. Was it sufficiently skilled and properly supervised?
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I wonder if it’s design, construction, project management. Maybe a combination of all three. The first thing that comes to mind is that local labor had to be utilized. Was it sufficiently skilled and properly supervised?
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The term of art is “tofu dreg project.”
