Electricity production

Myanmar has suspended a 380-megawatt hydropower project at the Manipur River in Chin State due to high risks, U Tun Naing, Deputy Minister for Electricity and Energy, told the Hluttaw last week. “After a review at the State Economic Coordination Committee Meeting, this project was found ...

Cambodia’s embrace of new coal power projects is making the Southeast Asian state “less attractive” to international brands producing in the country. In a letter addressed to the Cambodian government and seen by the Nikkei Asian Review, several major companies expressed concern about the country’s plans ...

Southeast Asia’s response to the Covid‑19 outbreak has curtailed electricity use and industrial production, pushing down coal consumption even further this year, according to the latest report from a non-governmental organisation which monitors worldwide fossil fuel infrastructure. Even before Covid-19, new coal plant construction was already slowing in the ...

In his book, River of Time, Jon Swain evoked brilliantly the heady beauty of Indochina and the great Mekong Delta in the very south of Vietnam, where the river finally meets the South China Sea. He also captured the terrifying uncertainty as the Vietnam War came to ...

The latest reports from the Lower Mekong Basin are cause for growing concern that another period of drought will succeed that of 2019, affecting Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. Expected rainfall from late May through June and July has not arrived, and the level of ...

Dealing with climate change should be a no-brainer, right? To paraphrase Greta Thunberg, the science is done and only denial, ignorance and inaction remain. Or is that really all? We live in a world of sovereign states. In none of them is it an easy matter ...

The inter-governmental Mekong River Commission on Friday urged China and Southeast Asian countries to share more data on hydropower dam operations, as water flow in the Mekong hit record low levels for a second consecutive year. A report by the commission attributes the low water level ...

Residents of Chaung Tha, a holiday resort and village on the Bay of Bengal, are still relying on diesel generators to get them through electricity blackouts more than four years after Myanmar’s government gave a Chinese company the go-ahead to build a wind farm nearby. Shortly ...

A report issued last week revealed that, worldwide, migratory freshwater fish have declined by 76% since 1970. This result joins a growing and dispiriting list of dramatic declines for biodiversity and wildlife. However, it also highlights a continuing threat to food security for many regions of the world.  Freshwater fish provide the primary ...

Chinese dams aren’t the problem causing droughts for downstream nations along the Mekong River – they are part of the solution – says a Chinese study released in July. The study is an attempt to pour water on claims by a rival US-backed investigation that blamed dams ...