
Contributed by Lucy Shaw
As an infrastructure investor and engineer, I delight in seeing infrastructure in the wild. From Nicaragua to Georgia to Ethiopia, I ask travel companions to drive slowly so that I can snap a picture of transmission lines or solar farms from the car window. I even made sure to document the infrastructure triumvirate (energy, telecoms, and transport) on a trek atop Kilimanjaro: a solar array, cell tower, and helipad.
With such an obsession, I deliberately traveled to an entire country, purely to see its infrastructure. I certainly was not disappointed by the gravitas of the Itaipú Dam in Eastern Paraguay.
The Itaipú Dam is a 14-gigawatt (GW) hydroelectric power plant that straddles the border of Paraguay and Brazil. Commissioned in 1984, it was once the world’s largest hydroelectric dam, since superseded by two mega dams in China.
Itaipú was conceived and built during the era of military governments in Latin America. All the initial contracts were negotiated by Brazil and Paraguay’s dictators, partially to end territorial disputes and conflict. The $12 billion (2018 prices) project was funded by the Brazilian government, including a loan to support Paraguay to meet its half of the costs. These debts were only paid off by 2023.
Itaipú is incredibly important to Paraguay. While it is a drop in the bucket of Brazil’s electricity grid of over 100 gigawatts, Itaipú supplies practically all of Paraguay’s electricity. Royalties from this and another, smaller, dam comprise 10% of the entire government’s revenue. Paraguay uses less than its allocated 50% of the dam’s capacity, at just 24% in 2022, up from 4-5% in 2008. Electricity from the dam is also low cost, at $47 per MWh in 2022, and available all day.
For these reasons, companies are looking to the region for projects that benefit from cheap, reliable, abundant electricity. One example is a hydrogen developer, Atome, who is developing the country’s first green ammonia facility using offtake from Itaipú.
Given Itaipú’s importance, and because I speak Spanish and not Portuguese, I hopped on a bus to Paraguay from Argentina to take a look. All I had booked for my visit to Paraguay was a private technical tour of Itaipú.
My guide, Talia, greeted me on arrival. I was given an oddly specific time and date for my tour, which led me to believe that I would be joining a larger group. Indeed, when I arrived, a large group of tourists exited the cinema hall, proceeding onward to the dam’s public viewing site. When it was my turn for viewing, however, I was ushered to the plush red seats of the cinema, entirely alone. They had decided to separate my tour from the only other VIP guest that day, the South African ambassador.
My visit began with a twenty-minute film of Hollywood proportions, that could only have been improved if Tom Hanks himself learned Spanish and narrated it. The story of the dam’s humble beginnings unfolded until the modern-day behemoth was revealed, with only a slight nod to its Chinese competitors.
We then boarded our private bus, the sole passengers. Our first stop was the public viewing platform, where Talia explained a bit about the construction of the dam, including the land clearing involved. From here, we left all the regular tourists and proceeded to the underbelly of the dam itself.
Our bus pulled up outside 20 giant pipes, 10 each on Paraguayan and Brazilian land. All the water powering the dam flowed through these pipes, entering through one side, and tumbling over the other, turning turbines as the water fell. We took a lift down to the bottom of the dam, which was once the riverbed. In the cavernous, gloomy guts of the dam, you can see to the top of the entire structure from its base. My mind alternated between imagining all the water imploding upon me, and calculating how fast I could climb the stairwell if the lift malfunctioned.
Luckily for us, the lift was in full working order, and we pressed on to the control room. At some point in this part of the tour, we crossed into Brazil, the second time that day that I had entered the country without getting a passport stamp.
While paused outside the control room, Talia breezily said that “like Chernobyl,” this room looked so retro because it was built in the 1980s. Not comforted by this comparison to Chernobyl, given we were effectively underwater, she continued to explain that the red lights on the panels were currently live and working, while green lights were taking a break.
We next journeyed to the engine room, where the turbines were spinning to create electricity. All the machines were humming the same industrial hymn, though the Paraguayan cylinders sang at a slightly deeper pitch due to their lower grid frequency.
Although we were not permitted into the control room to wreak havoc, in the engine room I was close enough to touch the machines. In an exhilarating moment, Talia photographed and then filmed me standing perilously close to the whirring turbines.
We emerged from the depths of the dam to gain perspective on its end product. Our bus drove us over a serene river, akin to the calm of crossing the seemingly endless Lake Ponchatrain in New Orleans. We got out at our final stop, overlooking the water as it erupted from the dam into the river below. Beneath us, the turbines were rumbling, generating electricity for an entire nation and part of another’s.
In a world where most of us don’t give a second thought to all the work involved in making sure our lights turn on every day, I am immensely grateful to the staff at Itaipú, especially Talia, for making an infrastructure project so accessible and fun to visit. I could not believe my luck in finding such a wonderful tour of an infrastructure project, let alone that it was technical and free. You can contact the team at the Itaipú dam on both the Paraguay and Brazil sides to inquire about arranging a technical visit next time you are in the region.