Turkish company pulls out of controversial Georgian hydropower project, 24 September 2021

The Turkish builder of what was supposed to be the largest energy project in independent Georgia's history has announced that it is pulling out of the project.

The move is a significant victory for a broad protest movement that opposed the Namakhvani hydropower project’s potential harm to the local environment and argued that the company’s contract with the Georgian government was deeply unfair to the state. The decision by the construction company, ENKA Renewables, became public on September 20. The company cited “long-standing breaches of contract and force majeure” in its decision to pull out of the $800 million project...

Construction work on the dam has been paused for several months after nearly a year of protests, which hit their peak this spring, led to a government promise to review elements of the contract including construction permits and the environmental impact...

Up to 300 families would have to have been resettled, and there were fears that the massive project could change the region’s microclimate and endanger its unique grape varieties, Tvishi and Usakhelouri.

The Institute of Earth Sciences at Ilia State University and the National Center for Seismic Monitoring wrote an open letter to the government, arguing that the environmental impact report prepared for the project understated the risk of seismic instability. They said that the dam could withstand an earthquake of 5 on the Richter scale, but that the region could experience an earthquake as strong as a 7...