Chicago helps China glow

The construction of a 1,000-foot-high dam that will provide as many as 10 million Chinese with electricity has a Chicago connection.

The Chicago office of MWH, a Colorado-based engineering firm, will supply engineering and construction management consulting for the Jinping I Hydropower project, to be built along the Yalong River in the Sichuan province of Southwest China.

The Chicago office of MWH, a Colorado-based engineering firm, will supply engineering and construction management consulting for the Jinping I Hydropower project, to be built along the Yalong River in the Sichuan province of Southwest China.

The $3.3 billion project, which will become one of the world's highest dams, is only the latest in a series of Chinese dam projects that have had consulting help from MWH, a company with 87-year-old Chicago roots in the Harza Engineering firm. Norman Bishop, MWH's hydro and dams business sector leader, said the water projects are helping to fill the rapidly growing energy needs of the Chinese economy.

The $3.3 billion project, which will become one of the world's highest dams, is only the latest in a series of Chinese dam projects that have had consulting help from MWH, a company with 87-year-old Chicago roots in the Harza Engineering firm. Norman Bishop, MWH's hydro and dams business sector leader, said the water projects are helping to fill the rapidly growing energy needs of the Chinese economy.

"Many areas in China have not had electric power," Bishop said. "We're talking about people who don't have even a 60-watt lightbulb in their homes. This is where we were in the early 1900s."

The first Jinping I unit comes on in 2012.

The dam is mainly for flood control -- that area of China is prone to devastating and sometimes fatal flooding. The dam's design is a double-curvature, thin arch -- which uses much less concrete than an older model like the Hoover Dam. Built by the state-owned Ertan Hydropower Development Co., Jinping I is expected to have a generation capacity of 3,600 megawatts, which will pay for the project's construction costs.

MWH has worked with Ertan since the 1980s, consulting on the Ertan Hydropower Station, the first hydroelectric project on the Yalong River. Bishop said MWH started meeting with the Chinese after former President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger helped warm up Sino-American relations in the 1970s.

About 77 percent of China's current electric needs are met by coal-fired plants, which has been connected to global warming. Another 1.7 percent is supplied by nuclear power, with the balance made up by hydropower, Bishop said.

China is second only to Canada in hydropower production, but that's changing "very rapidly," said Mario Finis, MWH's director of the Domestic East Group.

"China will soon become the largest hydropower producer in the world," said Finis, adding that China is concerned about air pollution and wants to diversify its sources of energy. "New development will focus on hydropower and clean coal technology."

Bishop, a frequent traveler to China, said he has seen a marked difference in the national mood since the 1980s. "They're excited," he said. "Whenever you meet anybody in China, they're smiling. They know they have a future."

cuss a new dam the company is consulting on being built in China. They stand at a model of a Colorado dam similar to the one being built in China.