National 5 (Spotlight Weekly)

Power From The Top

As a spin-off from another project, Department of Hydrology and Meteorology builds a power plant that is said to be located at the highest altitude in the world

By SANJAYA DHAKAL

Situated at the 4580 m above the sea level, the 15-Kilowatt strong Tsho Rolpa power project, completed just a few weeks ago, is said to be the world’s highest plant.

Dr. Madan Lal Shrestha, director general of the Department of Hydrology and Meteorology (DoHM) claimed that to his knowledge, the Tsho Rolpa plant is the highest one.

But being located in the highest altitude is not the only distinction enjoyed by the plant. It is the first plant which uses the water being forced out of the glacial lake. The Tsho Rolpa is a Glacial Lake located at the north-eastern Rolwaling valley.

Tsho Rolpa power station : Exemplary project

The DoHM, which operates the Tsho Rolpa Glacial Lake Outburst Flood (GLOF) Risk Reduction Project at the site came up with the idea of utilizing the water that was being regularly siphoned out of the lake and to use it to generate power to run its monitoring station at the site.

The department is running the monitoring station at the site since 1998 after the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) released a report warning that Tsho Rolpa glacial lake was on the brink of bursting and could trigger catastrophe to human settlements up to 100 kilometers downstream. If it burst, the glacial lake would flood the Rolwaling stream, which in turn, would trigger the flood in the Bhote Koshi river taking with it huge debris and threatening hundreds of thousands of people living in the downstream. Even the 36 MW strong Bhote Koshi Project, invested by US energy giant Panda and Harza Energy could be affected by the GLOF here.

The UNEP had also said that other 19 glacial lakes, too, were facing similar danger. Since Tsho Rolpa was the biggest danger of them, the government sprung into action and with the help from donor agency Netherlands Development Agency (NEDA) started preventive measures including siphoning off the water and even constructing canal to constantly force water to flow out.

After years of work, the water level at the Tsho Rolpa Glacial Lake has now been reduced by 3 m. The Lake’s moraine dam is 150 m high and the UNEP had suggested the lowering of 20 m to mitigate its threat. The lake is 1.7 square kilometer in area, having increased from 0.23 square kilometer in the 1950s. Environmentalists say that due to global warming and climate change, the process of melting of snow in the Himalayas have accelerated resulting in expansion of sizes of glacial lakes and shrinking of glacial rivers.

In fact, the reason why the Department decided to set up a power plant so high up there was because of its constant high costs of logistics. “It is very difficult and highly costly to run a regular monitoring station at a place where temperature is sub-zero all the year round and even reaches 25 degrees below the freezing point at winter,” said Kamal Budhathoki, a senior meteorologist who has been closely involved in the project. “We were facing financial as well as logistical constraints to transport fuel to run the station.”

There are at least three personnel permanently based in the monitoring site and the government was facing difficulty to provide regular supply of kerosene to run heater and perform other activities there. Either the fuel had to be airlifted, which was very costly or it had to be transported by porters, which took a week from the nearest road in Dolakha district.

“The power plant came up as a good idea to solve these problems,” said Dr. Shrestha. At the cost of around US$ 50,000, the Balaju Yantra Shala (BYS), a Kathmandu-based institute, built the plant indigenously.

The BYS is not new to constructing power plants at high altitude. Earlier, they had built a power plant of 20 kw capacity in the altitude of over 4400 m in Thorangphedi located at the Mustang district of north western Nepal. Mahendra Bahadur Karki, chairman of the BYS, said that the completion of the Tsho Rolpa power project has boosted their confidence. Other small hydro projects that are located in great height include the one at Thame near Namche Bazaar, located around 3500 m, which is the gateway to the Mount Everest. The 600 kw strong Thame project was built by Eco Himal under Austrian assistance.

The DoHM is skeptical about distributing the power produced to the local community. “We only built the plant to cater to our needs and we do not have the expertise to distribute the power to the community. Besides, at Tsho Rolpa, the nearest villages lies 5 km below the project site,” said Dr. Shrestha.

There are villages like Na, Beding, Jablu and so on. There are around 50-60 households in each of these villages. “The major contribution of this plant could be to show that micro hydro can be built in such altitude. We hope the experts of the hydropower will replicate the project to provide service to people elsewhere,” said Budhathoki.

The hydropower with the capacity to generate up to 100 kw are considered as micro hydro in Nepal. At present, there are 1956 micro hydro plants in different parts of the country with the installed capacity of over 13,000 kw. “The micro hydros have proved to be very beneficial to the local communities. It has helped a lot in the rural electrification,” said Shyam Upadhyaya, a research specialist at the Winrock International, an INGO that conducts researches on clean energy, agriculture and so on.