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Thailand brings power to the
people
By
Marwaan Macan-Markar
CHIANG RAI, Thailand - Over
the past seven months, Suphan Beka has been enjoying the
comforts many of her school friends take for granted -
sipping ice-cold drinks at home and watching Thai
television shows late at night. Yet it was only in
December that her home in the hills of northern Thailand
was linked to this country's electricity grid.
"A lot has changed in our home. We have a
fridge, a cooker, and I go to sleep late because we now
have TV," said Suphan, 16.
A similar sentiment
is echoed by other teenagers who have been enjoying the
changes that electricity has brought to their homes in a
small stretch of land 40 kilometers to the west of
Chiang Rai, in northern Thailand.
The provision
of electricity to Suphan's home is the result of Thai
authorities' steaming ahead with plans to ensure that
power supply reaches all of the country's rural and
urban communities. Currently, close to 99 percent of
Thailand's 70,000 villages have electricity, and all
urban centers have access to it.
This
determination by the country's energy policymakers has
also made Thailand, already the major economic power in
the Mekong region, the leading consumer of electricity
compared with its neighbors, such as Yunnan province in
southwestern China, Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia.
Thailand consumes 1,448 kilowatt-hours of
electricity per capita, as opposed to China's energy
consumption, which is 827kw-h per capita. Vietnam
consumes 286kw-h of electricity per capita, and Myanmar
68kw-h per capita, according to the 2003 United Nations
Human Development Report.
While Thailand's
desire to make electricity reach its remotest areas
makes a qualitative difference in many of its citizens'
lives, some analysts say it also tends to feed a growing
appetite for electricity that may have
less-than-desirable effects on neighboring countries.
That is because Thailand has increasingly been
encouraging or taking part in power projects across its
borders, including the development of large dams, that
would then sell power to Thailand.
Still, the
state-run Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand
(EGAT) is pushing ahead with plans to meet greater power
demands in the future, says Suphakij Nuntavorakarn, an
energy-policy researcher with the Sustainable Energy
Network of Thailand, a non-governmental group.
These plans are running into a gathering chorus
of doubts, questions and protest from both local
environmentalists such as Suphakij and regional and
international environmental lobbies.
On July 8,
the Thai government agreed to sign a power-purchasing
agreement with the government of neighboring Laos. In
effect, it has provided the financial impetus - and the
market - for a consortium of public and private
developers to start work on a hydroelectric project, Nam
Theun II, which has been dogged by controversy.
"EGAT is fully supportive of such measures given
the way it is supporting dam construction in Laos," said
Suphakij. "It wants Thailand to have such sources of
power to meet the rising local demands in the future."
The proposed dam in Laos is one of 32 hydropower
projects that have been identified as sites for dam
development in the Mekong region, the International
Rivers Network (IRN), a US-based environmental lobby,
stated in a document released this month.
Power
from "some of the most controversial dam projects in
China, Burma and Laos would be transmitted through [an
electricity] grid to the energy-hungry cities of
Thailand and Vietnam", IRN declared in its document,
"Trading Away the Future".
The projects,
estimated to cost US$4.6 billion, would add to the
legacy of "damaged livelihoods, cultures and ecosystems"
caused by development schemes built in the Mekong region
over the past decade, IRN added.
It blamed the
World Bank and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) for
supporting this regional power initiative, although a
senior World Bank economist told a recent seminar here
that there is "misinformation" about what critics call a
"Mekong power grid".
"The Mekong power grid is
one of the flagship initiatives of the [World Bank's]
Greater Mekong Subregion [GMS] program, which is
supposed to encourage cooperation and economic growth in
the six countries sharing the Mekong River basin,"
states IRN.
"This project should be halted
immediately," Susanne Wong, IRN's Southeast Asia
campaigner, said in an e-mail interview. "These
institutions [the World Bank and the ADB] are trampling
on the rights of affected people, inviting environmental
destruction and hindering the implementation of real
solutions for meeting the region's energy needs."
But Myo Thant, senior economist with the ADB's
Mekong department, said here that the Manila-based
financial institution had no intention of building a
Mekong power grid. The ADB would not support dam
construction "if there is a negative impact on a
neighboring country", he added. "There is misinformation
about the Mekong power grid."
However, he noted,
the ADB is keen on having the GMS countries agree to
trade power across national boundaries, which may have
been construed as a grand plan to build dams when it is
but an accord to trade electricity. "For now there is an
integrated agreement on power trade, but the details
have to be worked out," he added.
This
power-trading agreement was reached during a summit of
leaders of the six Mekong countries in Phnom Penh last
November. The leaders agreed to pursue a power
"interconnection and trading agreement", allowing
countries to supply or purchase power from one another's
electricity grids as they do other currently traded
goods.
This regional power-trading system aims
to link national transmission systems, enabling
countries to pool their energy resources to meet the
region's development agenda, states an ADB publication,
"Connecting Nations, Linking People".
(Inter
Press Service)
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