{"id":284015,"date":"2019-08-13T07:03:50","date_gmt":"2019-08-13T11:03:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/?guid=8bdb7ce9c1bc0b26ccc12509588081d7"},"modified":"2026-10-18T11:29:54","modified_gmt":"2026-10-18T15:29:54","slug":"der-spiegel-gerd-resettlement-costs-egypt-2019","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/284015","title":{"rendered":"DER SPIEGEL reported from the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on resettlement, costs and Egypt’s objections in 2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

DER SPIEGEL reported in August 2019 that the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam's first two turbines could produce power in late 2020, while disputes over resettlement, costs and Egypt's share of Nile water remained unresolved.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/figure>\n

The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on the Blue Nile near the Sudanese border, seen by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite on April 4, 2020. (Yonas Kidane \/ Copernicus EU via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0) [file photo]<\/em><\/p>\n

Reporter Christoph Titz described the dam's 155-meter retaining wall on the Blue Nile, known in Ethiopia as the Abay. Once full, the reservoir would be three times the size of Germany's Lake Constance and more than 100 meters deep in places, feeding 16 turbines designed to generate up to 6,000 megawatts, the magazine said.<\/p>\n

Lead engineer Ephrem Woldekidan told DER SPIEGEL that people affected by the first filling level had already been resettled. The government put the number of people living in the valley at 5,000, but community representatives said at least 15,000, and a survey by American researcher Jennifer C. Veilleux put the figure at 20,000, the magazine reported.<\/p>\n

In Erring, a Gumuz village on the Blue Nile 30 kilometers from the dam, 50-year-old Teha Abdilahi said his family would leave when the water came. \u201cThey'll go where I go \u2014 they can't live underwater, after all,\u201d he said of his wife and two daughters.<\/p>\n

The magazine cited a 2014 Ethiopian study showing that output at Egypt's Aswan High Dam could fall by 12 percent while the reservoir filled. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed told President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi in Cairo in 2018, \u201cI swear to God, we will never harm you,\u201d and two French engineering firms had been working since 2016 on filling recommendations for the three countries without an agreement, DER SPIEGEL said.<\/p>\n

Costs rose partly because of corruption and poor performance by the military-run Metals and Engineering Corporation, known as METEC, which lost its contract to Chinese companies, the magazine reported. Simegnew Bekele, the project's longtime lead engineer, was found dead in his car in Addis Ababa in July 2018 with a gunshot wound to the head; the official explanation was suicide.<\/p>\n

Some 3 billion euros had been spent by April 2019, and the government needed about 4 billion euros more to finish the wall and turbines by 2022, according to DER SPIEGEL. It said public servants had given a month's wages in earlier years and cited The Ethiopian Herald as reporting that 48 percent of the population wanted construction to continue without more of their money.<\/p>\n

Ethiopia began generating electricity from the dam's first turbine on Feb. 20, 2022, Reuters reported, and Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed formally inaugurated the dam on Sept. 9, 2025, over Egypt's objections.<\/p>\n

Sources:<\/strong> DER SPIEGEL International (Christoph Titz)<\/a>, DER SPIEGEL (Wayback Machine archive)<\/a>, Reuters (2022)<\/a>, Reuters (2025)<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DER SPIEGEL reported in August 2019 that the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam’s first two turbines could produce power in late 2020, while disputes over resettlement, costs and Egypt’s share of Nile water remained unresolved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":30,"featured_media":837948,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-284015","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ethiopian-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/gerd-sentinel-2-april-2020.jpg?fit=1280%2C1554&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9NivD-1bST","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284015","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/30"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=284015"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284015\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":837961,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284015\/revisions\/837961"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/837948"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=284015"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=284015"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=284015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}