Tarbela Hydroelectric Plant

The project is located in North – West Pakistan where the Indus, which rises in Tibet, leaves the mountainous region and enters the plain. This immense plain stretches over 1000 km to the shores of the Indian Ocean, and drains a surface of almost one million square kilometers.

The scheme is designed for the production of electric energy and for the supply of water for irrigation and creates a reservoir with a working storage capacity of 11,000 million cubic meters.

The origins of the project date back to development plans promoted by the World Bank in the early 1960s. The Indus Water Treaty was a complex international cooperation program whose goal was the development of Pakistan via the creation of infrastructure that would allow for the exploitation of the immense reserve of water resources constituted by the Indus basin.

Works for the construction of Tarbela's system of dams, an open-air powerhouse and the tunnels required by the main plant started on 1968. The size of the project was of a scale that had never before been experienced by the Italian company: the length of the main dam at its crest was almost 3 km, and the construction site required the constant presence of complex and diversified machinery, being five times the size of those of the largest construction sites until that moment managed by the company. Throughout the project, as many as 45,000 workers from 26 different countries worked at Tarbela; this also meant building a closeknit network of dwellings and auxiliary services.

In the early 1980s, the Tarbela consortium was also commissioned to enhance the plant's hydroelectric capacity by building a new power station. In addition to fulfilling the original purpose of the dam (i.e. supplying water for irrigation), since the start of the twenty-first century the plant has been generate over 23% of the hydroelectric output of the West Pakistan Water and Power Development Authority.

Client: WAPDA – West Pakistan Water and Power Development Authority