Energy insecurity is probably the quietest daily crisis Nepalis live with, second only to food. After all, many generations here grew up surrounded by energy scarcity, cooking with collected firewood, doing homework under dim candlelight during 18-hour-a-day load-shedding, and waiting endlessly outside of petrol pumps or Liquid Petroleum Gas (LPG) depots.
The chronic desperation was also recently captured when a video of people swimming into raging floodwaters to retrieve LPG cylinders that were floating downstream went viral. To outsiders and critics, it may be incomprehensible to risk life for a cylinder, or inhuman to steal. But to me, the image reflects a survival instinct forged by years of institutional failure.
The era of loadshedding finally ended when Nepal Electricity Authority, under Kulman Ghising’s leadership, reformed hydropower generation to address optimal use, transmission, and demand issues and improved governance. For an ordinary Nepali, this was the first time in recent memory that a public institution could be trusted. Even after a decade, the end of load-shedding is a gold standard for judging all public governance systems and possibilities.
Nepal sits on an estimated 83,000 MW of hydroelectricity with a commercial viability of 40,000 MW. That figure became a national mantra appearing on party manifestos, donor strategies, pitches for private developers, and, eventually, in the household stock market portfolios. Nepal’s prosperity had been given a delivery mechanism, and the mechanism was water.
Floods push Nepal’s hydropower boom into uncertainty
The momentum that followed was real. By 2025, the country had roughly 3,435 MW installed and another 4,063 MW under construction. Major and micro hydropowers lit homes which had never been on the grid; surplus moved across borders to India and Bangladesh; and construction work kept locals in their districts, rather than the Gulf, for job opportunities. For over a decade, hydropower was the thing that the country had gotten right.
The same urgency that ended load-shedding and earned the sector its credibility pushed developers through Free, Prior and Informed Consent with Indigenous Peoples. These included projects financed by Multilateral Banks violating their own safeguards mechanisms, including the recently destroyed Upper Trishuli (UT 1) project. Speed of progress was not the side effect of the boom—it was the key method used.
On Aug 26, a flash flood mercilessly washed away 12 hydropower stations, severely affecting 15 others along the Bhotekoshi and Trishuli rivers. More than 1,200 people have lost their lives, and thousands are missing; among them, many were employees and contractors of the hydropower stations. Preliminary estimates put recovery and reconstruction at around $1.3 billion, with a major estimation allocated to the restoration of the energy systems.
The financial figure is recoverable; the other loss isn’t. A decade of steady power and progress in the hydropower sector built a slow and steady trust and confidence in the system — to plan an evening, run and operate businesses, reform policies with the assumption that the switches remained on. Then the flood washed away the plants. It is only after we ask, “Did we actually solve the darkness, or simply give the switches to turn off from mismanaged humans to climate catastrophe?”
The question matters more now than it would have a decade ago because we have since connected other things to the switch, and the biggest plug is the Electric Vehicle (EV) sector.
Published in Dawn, September 7th, 2026
