Qualla: Sê San Dam

Sê San Dam: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The water that turns the three turbines at Sê San 4 does not stop at the border. A short way downstream it crosses into Cambodia, changes its name to the Tonlé San, runs the width of Ratanakiri province and joins the Mekong at Stung Treng. Sê San 4 was designed as the last dam on the Vietnamese stretch of the river — the bottom rung of a hydropower staircase approved by the Prime Minister in 2001 — which makes it the exact point where one country's engineering plan hands the river over to another country's floodplain. Nobody who built it framed it that way. But that is where it sits.

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Sê San Dam: The Bottom Rung

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Sê San cascade is a single machine spread over three hundred kilometres. Thượng Kon Tum, Plei Krông, Ya Ly, Sê San 3, Sê San 3A and Sê San 4 were planned together in 2001 as a staircase, with Sê San 4A added later below them all, and the design logic binds them: the large res...

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Sê San Dam: Six Years, Three Turbines

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Ground was broken in November 2004. The plant was finished in March 2010 and the works formally signed off in December 2012 — three units, 360 megawatts, sunk into the gorge country where the lower Sê San cuts deep between high ridges. That terrain is the reason the dam is here a...

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Sê San Dam: The Year It Barely Ran

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A design output figure is a promise about an average year, and the Central Highlands do not reliably supply average years. In 2011, only months after Sê San 4 came fully online, the dry season across the region drew the reservoirs down so far that hydropower stations were reduced...

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Sê San Dam: Sun for the Dry Season

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The answer that did emerge was to stop relying on the water alone. A 49 megawatt-peak solar plant was built on land belonging to the hydropower station on the Gia Lai side, its entire EPC contract financed by the Agence Française de Développement; the credit agreement was signed ...

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Sê San Dam: A Village That Floats

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Drive seventy kilometres west from Pleiku and you reach Ia O commune, where the reservoir spreads out behind the dam and a fishing village floats on it. These are households making a living from an impoundment that did not exist a generation ago, on water that covers ground peopl...

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