4. Dam at Three Gorges
Place: China
Complete Expense: $37.2 billion*
Year Completed: 2006
The Three Gorges Dam was the largest operational hydroelectric dam in the world when it was finished in 2006, three years after it was first built, and as of 2018, it produced twenty times more electricity than the Hoover Dam.
Shutterstock, PRILL and Three Gorges Dam
The sum paid to flood the reservoir that the dam filled was included in the project’s total cost. The dam has the capacity to actually slow down the Earth’s rotation because it is displacing such a large amount of water.
The area is so vast that it once had 13 cities, 140 towns, thousands of villages, and 1.3 million people—who have since been evacuated and given compensation. The $37.2 billion that the Three Gorges Dam was supposed to cost to develop was already recovered by 2013.
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