2025

the year Bhutan, for the first time in its history, used more of its own electricity than it exported

Where the Water Goes: Bhutan's Power, Traced

One river system feeds the exports, the factories, the mines, the kitchens — and 40% of the national budget. This is the map of where it all flows.

The source

A one-resource superpower

Bhutan’s economy rests on a single world-class resource: falling water. Everything else — the budget, the factories, the export ledger, the debt — sits downstream of it.

3,632 MW

installed hydropower capacity — Tala and Punatsangchhu-II at over 1,000 MW each, Mangdechhu, Chhukha and a tail of smaller plants

15,803 GWh

record generation in 2025, up 35.8% in a single year as Punatsangchhu-II delivered its first full year

~1/10th

of the assessed technical potential actually built — the reason every plan speaks of tens of gigawatts more

The catch: the supply is seasonal. The monsoon months produce several times what the country can use; the winter months, a fraction of it. Bhutan’s power is abundant on average — and scarce on schedule.

Fork one

Export it — or keep it?

For forty years the answer was automatic: use a little, sell the rest to India. Then, in 2025, the lines crossed for the first time in Bhutan’s history.

9,160 GWh

consumed at home in 2025 — the first year domestic use beat exports

7,925 GWh

exported to India — still vital, no longer dominant

336 → 1,477 MW

peak domestic demand, 2015 → 2025. More than quadrupled in a decade

The export machine now feeds itself first. Every new dam arrives into a different question than the one it was planned for.

Fork two

The factory — or the kitchen?

Follow the domestic branch and it forks again — and this is the split almost nobody sees. Bhutan’s electricity does not mainly light Bhutanese homes.

~88%

of domestic electricity is consumed by just 23 high-voltage industrial customers — smelters, ferro-alloys, cement, and round-the-clock digital loads (the publicly announced DHI–BitDeer mining venture scales toward ~600 MW)

~10%

covers everyone else: 99.96% of all customers — every home, shop, school and monastery in the kingdom

That concentration is deliberate: cheap power is Bhutan’s one industrial advantage. It worked so well that industry now is the domestic demand — consuming like cities, employing like workshops.

The price ladder

Who pays what for the same river

Rank every buyer of Bhutan’s electricity by the price they pay per unit, and the ladder comes out upside down.

Nu 2.66

a Bhutanese household, above the subsidised lifeline blocks — the top of the ladder

Nu 2.55

India's grid, for Chhukha's power (1980s–90s contracts)

Nu 2.12

India's grid, for Tala's power — less than a Thimphu kitchen pays

Nu 1.60

the 23 industrial giants on HV1 — about 1.9 US cents, among the cheapest industrial power on earth

The smallest buyer pays the most; the biggest buyers pay the least. And each winter the state buys power back from India at Nu 4–6 a unit to cover the lean season — then sells it on at the tariffs above. The 2025–28 revision proposed to more than double the household rate while keeping the ladder’s shape.

The stake

Where the water lands: the treasury

~40%

of all national domestic revenue flows from the DHI group — hydropower its largest engine. Nu 22 billion remitted in 2024

Nu 172 bn

of hydropower debt — about 60% of Bhutan's entire external debt, owed mostly to India, repaid in electricity

−31%

what one drought (2018) did to DHI group profit. When the monsoon is weak, the budget is weak

The asset and the risk are the same thing: the state’s income, its industry and its debt all sit on one seasonal, warming, rupee-priced river.

The arc

Sixty years of deciding what water is for

1986 Chhukha commissions — the first export machine, financed by India, repaid in electricity
2006–07 Tala (1,020 MW) comes online; hydropower becomes the budget's backbone
2008–10 The Punatsangchhu twins break ground — 2,220 MW meant for ~2016–17
Dec 2024 Punatsangchhu-II finally commissions, seven years late; its sister is still unfinished
2025 The crossover: domestic use beats exports for the first time in history
2026 → Ten more projects planned (9,892 MW, ~Nu 800bn) — the same model, ten more times

The kingdom is only now deciding what its water is truly for: the export line, the factory, the mine, or the kitchen. The full analysis: The Water Economy, Who Gets the Cheap Power? and The Punatsangchhu Problem.