Visiting Three Gorges, Kalla wants to build more dams

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YICHANG, China (JP): Impressed by the Three Gorges Dam in China, the world's biggest, Vice President Jusuf Kalla said Sunday that Indonesia needs to build more dams to solve problems of flooding and shortages of water and energy.

During his visit to Three Gorges, Kalla said Indonesia could learn a lot from the way the Chinese government built the dam, which required the relocation of one million people and funding of US$20 billion.

Despite protests from environmentalists, the Chinese government pressed ahead with the project and finished the dam construction last year.

Three Gorges was built to solve recurrent flooding and to generate electricity.

"This dam is a world scale, not just a Chinese scale. The electricity that will be produced here will be the same as what we are producing now in Indonesia. It means they think big for their economic advancement," Kalla said.

Three Gorges will produce a total of 23,000 megawatts of electricity annually when all the generators are in place by 2009.

"We are now thinking of building bigger dams in Indonesia.Currently, we are building two dams in Asahan (North Sumatra) and Kerinci (Jambi)," he said.

"We need to build more dams because hydropower plants are the safest and in the longer term they are cheap, although they are expensive to build."

Kalla said construction normally cost US$1.5 million per megawatt capacity of hydropower plant. However, if the capacity is large enough, the cost will go down. Three Gorges Dam, for example, cost less than $1 million per megawatt capacity, he said.

Kalla also dismissed the threat of protests by environmental activists if Indonesia did pursue the construction of more dams, saying such actions were often about issues other than the environment.