High up in China’s Sichuan province sits a structure that towers over every other dam on Earth. The Jinping-I Dam rises 305 meters, which means it’s taller than the Eiffel Tower. It is not just a wall of concrete holding back water. It is a piece of engineering designed with a double-curvature arch that bends against the Yalong River with incredible strength.
Construction kicked off back in 2005 and the first power units came online in 2013. Since then, the dam has become a big player in China’s West–East Electricity Transfer project, which moves huge amounts of energy from resource-rich western regions to the more energy-hungry east. With six massive turbines, each at 600 megawatts, Jinping-I cranks out over 16 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity every year. That is enough to keep millions of homes and industries running.
The reservoir behind it is enormous too. It stretches across more than 80 square kilometers and can hold 7.76 billion cubic meters of water. Out of that, about 5 billion cubic meters is usable for electricity generation and flood control. To make all that work, engineers had to deal with tricky geology. The dam is wedged into steep, unstable rock formations, so every load and stress point had to be carefully calculated. It also comes with a safety net of flood control features, from surface spillways to bottom outlets, plus a diversion tunnel that connects to a downstream station called Jinping-II.
Of course, projects like this come with trade-offs. Around 7,000 people were relocated to make space for the reservoir. Scientists have also pointed out that filling the dam triggered more than 300 small earthquakes, a reminder of how much impact massive projects can have on the environment.
For now, Jinping-I holds the crown as the tallest dam in the world, but that might change soon. Another giant, the Shuangjiangkou Dam, is under construction nearby and could end up standing 315 meters tall. If it finishes as planned, it would beat Jinping-I by 10 meters and take over the top spot.
Until then, Jinping-I remains an engineering marvel. It is a mix of raw size, precision design, and sheer ambition that shows just how far dam construction has come.