Qualla: Kirirom 1 Hydropower Dam

Kirirom 1 Hydropower Dam: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The engineers who helped build this dam came from a country that has since ceased to exist. Yugoslavia lent its technical support to the Kirirom I hydroelectric plant in the 1960s, on a pine-forested plateau in the eastern Cardamom Mountains about 110 kilometres southwest of Phnom Penh. The plant came online in 1965, the first hydroelectric station Cambodia ever had. Then it stopped for twenty-seven years - and when it started again, in 2002, it was a Chinese state enterprise that had rebuilt it. The machinery is small, the numbers are unimpressive, and almost nothing about modern Cambodia is legible in a single object more clearly.

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Kirirom 1 Hydropower Dam: Happiness Mountain

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The plateau got its name from a king. In the 1930s King Sisowath Monivong renamed the area Kirirom - Happiness Mountain - having found it a pleasant escape from the heat of the plain, much as the French were then doing on Bokor further south. Before that it was Phnom Vorvong Sorv...

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Kirirom 1 Hydropower Dam: Twelve Megawatts

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

By the standards of the dams Cambodia builds now, Kirirom 1 is a rounding error. It is an earth-core rockfill embankment, 34 metres high and 343 metres long, backing up a reservoir on the plateau and driving two generating units of six megawatts each - twelve megawatts in total. ...

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Kirirom 1 Hydropower Dam: 1975

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Then the power went off. When the Khmer Rouge took the country in April 1975, the plant was partially destroyed and generation stopped entirely. It is worth being precise about why a piece of infrastructure would simply cease: the regime emptied Cambodia's cities, abolished money...

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Kirirom 1 Hydropower Dam: Coming Back On

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The restart was a commercial transaction. In 1999 the China Electric Power Technology Import and Export Corporation, a Chinese state-owned enterprise, was contracted to rebuild the plant at a cost of US$24 million under a 30-year build-operate-transfer agreement - it would run th...

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Kirirom 1 Hydropower Dam: A Small Dam With a Long Memory

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Visitors come to Kirirom for the pine air and the waterfalls and generally do not go looking for a 34-metre embankment. They should. Read the dates in order - Yugoslav assistance in the 1960s, silence from 1975, a Chinese state company in 1999, back online in 2002 - and you have ...

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