Powerhouse Laos Offers Burma a Fix to Electricity Woes
Burma’s chronic lack of electricity to power its economic development could be solved from an unlikely source—underdeveloped Laos.
Laos has just 6.8 million people and is mostly covered in forest, but is almost as big geographically as Italy, which has a population of 60 million. It also has numerous fast-flowing rivers, running from mountains in the north as high as 2,800 meters, and the communist government in Vientiane has drawn up plans to build scores of dams on them to harness their hydroelectric potential.
If all the hydro-dam projects under construction or firmly planned and on the drawing board were built, Laos would have an electricity generating capacity of …..