FAQ
How many hydropower projects is Bhutan building?
The 13th Five-Year Plan commits Bhutan to ten further large hydropower projects totalling 9,892 MW — Nyera Amari (404 MW), Kholongchhu (600 MW, revived as a DGPC–Tata Power joint venture), Dorjilung (1,125 MW), Bunakha (180 MW), Wangchhu (900 MW), Khomachhu (363 MW), Dangchhu (170 MW), Chamkharchhu-I (770 MW), Sankosh (2,585 MW) and Kuri-Gongri (2,800 MW) — plus a 1,800 MW Gongri–Jericho pumped-storage scheme under study. Together they would roughly quadruple today's ~3,632 MW installed base, at a construction cost on the order of Nu 800 billion over the coming decades. The open question is pace: the last two mega-projects took fourteen and eighteen-plus years against six-to-ten-year global norms.
Ten projects, 9,892 MW — nearly quadrupling the installed base, with Sankosh (2,585 MW) and Kuri-Gongri (2,800 MW) each larger than anything Bhutan has ever built, and Kholongchhu already moving as a 600 MW joint venture between DGPC and India’s Tata Power. A 1,800 MW pumped-storage scheme (Gongri–Jericho) is under study alongside — the first project aimed squarely at the winter gap rather than at exports.
Three things determine what the list really means:
- Pace. The last two mega-dams took fourteen and eighteen-plus years; at that pace the 2040 generation targets land in the 2050s (The Punatsangchhu Problem).
- Money. On the order of Nu 800 billion of construction — financed largely the old way, and priced, so far, in rupees with no exchange-rate protection.
- Purpose. Every project was conceived as an export machine — but Bhutan now uses more power than it sells, so what the pipeline is for is quietly being renegotiated by reality.