Nepal Bet Nearly Everything on Hydropower. The Floods Show Why That’s a Problem

Nepal’s hydropower success has left it dangerously exposed. Almost all of the country’s electricity comes from hydropower, but last week’s deadly floods damaged 12 plants and knocked out more than 10% of its generating capacity.

More than 1,300 people were killed and thousands remained missing after floods destroyed entire villages near the Nepal-Tibet border. The damaged facilities sit in the Trishuli River basin, and operators said they still did not know whether any could return to service.

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The time has come for a rethink of our hydropower policy.

The Nepal Electricity Authority, which owns six of the 12 damaged plants, assured households that electricity supplies remained adequate. But its spokesman, Rajan Dhakal, said the growing frequency of climate-related disasters meant “the time has come for a rethink of our hydropower policy”.

Hydropower expansion transformed Nepal’s electricity supply. In 2010, only two-thirds of the population had access to electricity, and connected households faced outages lasting up to 16 hours a day. By 2018, after infrastructure expansion, efforts to tackle corruption and increased imports from India, most of the country had round-the-clock power.

Nepal now has 225 hydropower plants with more than 3,900 megawatts of installed capacity, enough to supply about three million households at once. Hundreds more projects are under construction or planned, mostly high in the mountains, where fast-flowing rivers provide power without large storage systems.

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Once-in-a-century.

Those same high-altitude regions are warming 50% faster than the global average. Preliminary investigations linked the flash flood to a collapsed glacier and its bedrock, although scientists said it was too early to establish a firm connection to climate change. Nepal’s disaster authority has previously said that more than nine in 10 disasters recorded from 2018 to 2024 were climate-related.

Former Energy Minister Kulman Ghising called the flood a “once-in-a-century” event and said it should influence how plants are designed and located. He called for more resilient facilities, early-warning systems and stronger evacuation plans. Potentially hundreds of hydropower workers, engineers and residents were believed to be trapped in mud-filled plant tunnels.

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We need to design the plants to be more resilient to the floods and, most importantly, adopt early-warning systems as well as robust emergency evacuation measures.