Time - The paddlers slap the hulls of their candy colored kayaks with open palms, sending deep thunks bouncing off the walls of the Albanian prime minister’s offices in Tirana, the capital. Chants of “No dams!” join the thumping, as nearly a hundred residents of Kuta, an ancient village threatened with flooding by a proposed dam project on the Vjosa River, join the demonstration. Rok Rozman, a Slovenian Olympic rower, biologist and environmental campaigner, hoists a kayak covered in dozens of signatures protesting the dam, and heaves it over the heads of the police line protecting the building. Another kayaker catches it and tries to run it up the steps of the offices to place it on the prime minister’s doorstep, but is roughly stopped by police. The boat crashes to the ground and is kicked back amidst the demonstrators.
“This is the last big free flowing river [system] in Europe,” Rozman tells TIME, the day before the protest on May 20. Sitting with TIME in a lush garden near the Vjosa in southern Albania, he explains why the demonstration is needed. The river runs 272 km (169 miles) from the mountains of northern Greece through Albania, and is the last undammed river system in all of Europe outside of the scantly-populated Russian Arctic. “They are still trying to tell people that this is green energy, that they are helping the locals, saving the environment, but this is all that is left,” says Rozman.
At a time when dams are slowly being removed in the U.S., a surge of interest in renewable power has Balkan governments scrambling to harness the power of their rivers. The proposed 45-m (147 ft) Pocem dam near Kuta represents just one of nearly 1,400 new small and large hydroelectric projects planned across the Balkans, as countries like Albania, Serbia and Macedonia rush to cash in on a flood of investment in green energy. Globally, in 2015, both generating capacity and investment increased to an unprecedented level, reaching $286 billion, according to the Renewables Global Status Report. While the U.S. now gets around 13 percent of its energy from renewables, the E.U. sources 44 percent from green power, and demand continues to grow. But as development moves ahead, the economic, social and even environmental drawbacks are casting a black shadow over the green boom. In the EU, 25.4 percent of primary energy production comes from renewables, reports EuroStat. Of that, hydropower makes up 16.5 percent, wind provides 11.1 percent and solar accounts for 6.1 percent. In the decade from 2004-2014, renewable energy produced in the EU increased by 73.1 percent.
The wave of dam and small hydropower projects has received much of its funding from large multilateral development banks like the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC). And activists say those loans are sometimes based on shoddy environmental impact assessments. And in the case of some privately funded projects, concessions have been given as election year pork. Looking at the dates of past hydroelectric projects, Zamir Dedej, the director of the Albanian government’s National Agency of Protected Areas, says nearly all the projects were given as kickbacks for votes. “There is a lot of corruption inside of this process.” Read more..
