Under an azure Patagonia sky, a few dozen conservation-minded citizens and their children took part in a puppet show recently in the town square of Cochrane, a tiny hamlet in southern Chile nestled between ancient forests and winding rivers. In the story, a purple otter sought guidance from the mystical forest spirit about the malevolent plans of a gravelly-voiced developer who wants to dam the river, a scheme that would disfigure the landscape and, with it, the otter’s home.
The program, hosted by the Patagonia Without Dams campaign, was a small but illustrative part of what has grown this year into a nationwide protest movement against a real-life proposal: a $3.2 billion project to build five hydroelectric dams along the nearby Baker and Pascual Rivers, and to stretch 1,200 miles of high-tension wires across national parks and other protected lands to transmit the electricity out of Patagonia and up to central Chile, where most of it will be used. “Compared to a thermoelectric plant, this is clean energy,” Patagonia resident and radio station employee Claudia Torres, 36, conceded. “But on the scale they mean to implement this project, it will have a tremendous environmental and social impact.”
Still, puppet shows — and polls that show a majority of Chileans opposed to the plan, many of them taking to the streets en masse in recent weeks — were apparently no match for the energy needs of one of Latin America’s fastest-growing and most developed economies. This week a federal environmental commission, appointed by pro-dam President Sebastin Piera, approved the Patagonia project headed by HidroAysn, a joint venture between Chile’s largest electrical utility, Endesa, and another, Colbn. By the time the HidroAysn project is up and running in 2026, according to the company, the dams could generate a total of 2,750 megawatts. That’s almost a third of the current 10,000-megawatt capacity of Chile’s central power grid, where the capital, Santiago, is located, and almost a fifth of the nation’s total 15,000-megawatt capacity.
The problem for HidroAysn’s opponents is that Chile needs to double that national capacity by the end of this decade to keep its tiger-like economy, a mining- an export-driven model for Latin America, humming and growing. And hydropower, given the prodigious supply of rain and rivers in regions like Patagonia, is one of the most abundant and affordable sources to tap.”Sometimes governments have to take hard decisions,” Piera, a conservative, said after the commission’s vote. “But if we don’t take these decisions today, we’re condemning our country to blackouts down the road.” The more liberal Eduardo Frei, a former President and current Senator, agrees. In Chile, which has scant oil and gas reserves, “the greatest energy wealth [is] water,” Frei insisted recently, and little can dissuade governments right now from pursuing it. In neighboring Brazil, in fact, hydropower accounts for 80% of total electricity.
But the problem for governments like Chile’s is that hydro-electricity is also becoming one of the most controversial energy sources in regions such as South America. On that continent, large protests have met not just the HidroAysn proposal but also the Belo Monte hydro-dam project in Brazil, which is slated to be the world’s third-largest. Among environmentalists and ordinary citizens alike, there is a growing fear that countries have grown too reliant on water power, whose dam complexes can cause significant eco-disruption in pristine swaths like Patagonia, a paradise of glaciers, lakes, woodlands, fjords and rivers like the Baker, Chile’s largest in terms of water volume. The HidroAysn dams would flood 14,000 acres , carve up forests and threaten eco-tourism attractions like white-water rafting.
