As Zambia Has Learned Even The Biggest Dams On The Biggest Rivers Don't Matter During Drought

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Water levels at the Kariba Dam have significantly fallen, and only one of the six turbines at Zambia’s Kariba North Bank Power Station is currently working. (Ilan Godfrey for The Washington Post)

LUSAKA, Zambia — For a while, it looked like Zambia had achieved a status that almost any nation would envy. Drawing hydropower from the massive Zambezi River and its tributaries, the country could meet its energy needs while producing almost zero planet-warming emissions. It was renewable energy of the best kind — cheap and seemingly abundant. Zambia’s recently departed environment minister touted the country’s green credentials in dozens of speeches for international crowds.

But that was all before an epic drought that slowed the Zambezi to a trickle and brought water levels to nearly the lowest point on record. Intermittent outages started in March and gradually intensified as the hydropower generators switched off. And Zambia, for several months now, has plunged into near-total darkness. “We were swimming in happiness that we were largely green,” Zambia’s president, Hakainde Hichilema, said in an interview at his office last month. “The drought has told us that even when we were largely green, it was a risk.”

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Hydropower — which makes up about half of the world’s clean energy supply — saw a record decline last year. To weather that turmoil, Beijing fired up more coal plants. India increased coal imports. The International Energy Agency says that global emissions from electricity generation would have fallen last year, instead of rising to another record high, had it not been for unexpected, drought-related hydropower failures on multiple continents — and the policy decisions that followed. This year, the extreme shortages have shifted to other part of the world. Amid a historic South American drought, Ecuador is contending with daily blackouts, and its government leased a Turkish barge-mounted power plant as an emergency measure.

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Zambia has moved quickly to double the capacity of an existing coal-fired power plant that, when the expansion is completed in two years, will give the country a modest energy boost. It has also rush-ordered diesel generators, distributing them in markets across the capital of Lusaka. But in the meantime, there’s an even dirtier fuel that is booming in demand: charcoal. Made by cutting and incinerating trees, the charcoal arrives in Lusaka on truckbeds. It’s towed to markets by people with rickety wheelbarrows. It’s parceled into small bags and sold along roadsides. And, eventually, it is heated under steel grills by people who would have preferred an alternative. Government officials say they want to crack down on production, which is decimating Zambia’s forests. But people need to cook.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/11/17/zambia-drought-hydropower-climate-change/