Pangue Hydroelectric Plant is a

hydroelectric Hydroelectricity, or hydroelectric power, is electricity generated from hydropower (water power). Hydropower supplies one sixth of the world's electricity, almost 4500 TWh in 2020, which is more than all other renewable sources combined and ...

power station in Bío Bío Region,

Chile Chile, officially the Republic of Chile, is a country in the western part of South America. It is the southernmost country in the world, and the closest to Antarctica, occupying a long and narrow strip of land between the Andes to the east a ...

. It lies west of

Callaqui Callaqui is a stratovolcano located in the Bío Bío Region of Chile. It is a large ice-capped, basaltic andesite volcano which is elongated in the northeast-southwest direction, due to its construction along an long fissure. Numerous cin ...

volcano at the confluence of the rivers Pangue and Huiri-Huiri. The plant uses water from the upper Bío Bío River and produces of

electricity Electricity is the set of physical phenomena associated with the presence and motion of matter that has a property of electric charge. Electricity is related to magnetism, both being part of the phenomenon of electromagnetism, as described ...

.Electricity generation capacity of Chile
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Comisión Nacional de Energía
/ref> The plant was built by Endesa in 1996.

Technical features

The penstock delivering water to the power plant has a hydraulic head of and a design volume of . Pangue contributes 10% of the electricity fed into the Chilean integrated grid, making it the third largest power station after Ralco () and Pehuenche (). The dam is made of

roller-compacted concrete Roller-compacted concrete (RCC) or rolled concrete (rollcrete) is a special blend of concrete that has essentially the same ingredients as conventional concrete but in different ratios, and increasingly with partial substitution of fly ash for Po ...

, using about a million cubic meter of concrete. The dam and power plant were built from 1993 to 1996. Behind the dam lies a reservoir of , long and wide. This makes it one of the most efficient large hydropower plants in the world, as measured by the relation between electricity production and area flooded. The construction of Pangue, just as the one of Ralco, generated controversies between environmentalists, the Government and the private power company Endesa, because the dam impacted the indigenous Pehuenche people, whitewater rafting areas and the rights of farmers further downstream.

Controversy over water rights

During the construction of the dam, the Appellate Court of Concepcion halted construction arguing that the filling of the reservoir and the dam’s operation unduly affected the water rights of farmers further downstream. However, the Chilean Supreme Court overruled the lower court and decided that the nonconsumptive water rights of Endesa took precedence over the consumptive water rights of irrigators. One U.S. scholar said that the decision relied on a government report that itself was “hard to interpret as anything other than a response to political pressure from higher levels of government”, that the decision was “seriously flawed”, made “on the basis of legal reasoning of dubious quality” and that the decision constituted “a major transfer of wealth from irrigators to electric companies”.

References

{{Authority control Energy infrastructure completed in 1996 Energy infrastructure in Biobío Region Hydroelectric power stations in Chile Roller-compacted concrete dams