By Niharika Mandhana, Krishna Pokharel, and Tripti Lahiri, “Giant Floods Crash Nepal’s Energy Bet” (Wall Street Journal (September 10, 2026).
The front page article was subtitled: “Hundreds of hydropower projects are threatened by instability in Himalayas.” The grim news:
Rasuwagadhi was the first of nearly a dozen such installations—some active, others under construction—wrecked by the Aug. 26 disaster in Nepal. The roiling mass of water, unleashed by a glacial collapse, swept down the Trishuli river, devastating a roughly 40-mile corridor of dams that were supposed to drive economic growth for mountainous Nepal. Around 1,400 people have died overall and more than 5,000 are missing.
The tourism-and aid-dependent nation, crisscrossed by snow fed rivers, has looked to hydropower as the answer to its energy needs and central to its development plans. Private investment has poured in, quadrupling installed capacity over the past decade. More than 210 projects under construction would expand that by150%, according to industry estimates. The once energy-starved country has even been exporting power in recent years. The future of that strategy has come into question as a warming planet destabilizes Himalayan glaciers and river systems, increasingly putting human lives and billions of dollars at risk.
Hydropower planners in Nepal need to rethink their approach and project design, otherwise in vesting in that sector in the Himalayan region will be a “huge risk,” said Giri Raj Adhikari, the project’s technical director. Upper Trishuli1 was constructed for water flows, not a massive debris-laden surge like in the August disaster, with boulders as big as 25 feet across, he said.
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