Qualla: HidroAysén

HidroAysén: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Three words ended up on bumper stickers across an entire country: Patagonia Sin Represas. Patagonia without dams. The phrase became the rallying cry against HidroAysén, a plan to build five hydroelectric dams on two of the wildest rivers in Chile, the Baker and the Pascua. On paper it was the largest energy project in the nation's history, a 2,750-megawatt scheme worth some 3.2 billion dollars, backed by two governments and Chile's biggest power companies. It would have generated roughly a fifth of the central grid's projected demand. It was approved in 2011. By 2014 it was rejected, and by November 2017 its own builders walked away. This is the story of how a remote, lightly populated corner of Patagonia defeated a project nearly everyone assumed was inevitable.

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HidroAysén: The Case For the Dams

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The argument for HidroAysén was not frivolous. Chile is energy-hungry and chronically short of domestic power, and by the late 2000s two-thirds of Chileans lived in cities where air pollution regularly broke national standards, much of it from coal and petroleum-coke plants. Hydr...

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HidroAysén: The Case Against

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The opposition saw a different ledger. The dams would have flooded around 5,900 hectares and touched, directly or indirectly, six national parks, eleven nature reserves, sixteen wetlands, and dozens of protected sites in one of the largest untouched landscapes left on Earth. The ...

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HidroAysén: A Country Turns Against a Project

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

When the committee approved the dams in May 2011, ten votes to one abstention, the streets answered. Opposition that had hovered around 38 percent when the project was first floated climbed past 70 percent. Protests drew thousands; some turned destructive, injuring police and dam...

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HidroAysén: How It Fell Apart

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The project died slowly, on paperwork and politics. The environmental impact assessment, first submitted in 2008, was repeatedly sent back as incomplete, criticized for failing to plan for the relocation of the families who lived in the flood zone, for thin analysis of the impact...

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