Operating Fleet Is Overwhelmingly RoR/PRoR, Not True Storage
- Claim
- C-005
- Confidence
- high
- Status
- stable
- Page status
- Working page
- Updated
- 2026-11-04
- Last reviewed
- 2026-11-04
- Review due
- 2027-02-04
Claim
Nepal's operating hydropower fleet is overwhelmingly run-of-river (RoR) and peaking run-of-river (PRoR), while demonstrated operating seasonal-storage capacity is small.
Evidence
- The World Bank's 2025 Country Economic Memorandum describes more than 90% of Nepal's hydropower as RoR or PRoR within its end-2024 sector boundary.
- The 2025 ERC/ECA storage-PPA discussion paper independently describes hydro capacity as predominantly RoR, with a smaller number of PRoR plants providing a few hours of storage. Its existing-plant annex separately classifies named RoR, PRoR, and reservoir plants.
- The June 2026 DoED operating-hydro register totals 3,909.721 MW. Within that register, the Kulekhani I–III seasonal-service cascade totals 106 MW, or 2.71%. The linked storage comparison gives a bounded active-storage estimate of ~85–150 MCM for the Kulekhani system. These figures identify the scale of the named operating exception; they are not a quantified national solution and do not classify the full 97.29% complement by subtraction.
- The Episode 1 plant-level audit explicitly classifies 2,607.210 MW, or 66.7% of the June 2026 register. The remaining plants stay unresolved until a design, operator, government, lender, or equivalent primary record establishes hydraulic type and control duration.
Confidence Rationale
High for the structural claim. Two high-authority sector sources independently describe a predominantly RoR/PRoR fleet, and the operating register shows that the named Kulekhani seasonal-service cascade is small relative to total operating hydro.
The confidence does not extend to one exact current RoR/PRoR percentage derived from the incomplete plant audit. Different sources use different dates and taxonomies, and the DoED operating list does not assign one consistent hydraulic class to every plant.
Unresolved Issues
- Complete the operating-plant taxonomy and record RoR, PRoR, pondage duration, cascade dependence, and seasonal-storage service separately.
- Reconcile the source dates and denominators behind the older 85.7% RoR / 9.9% PRoR / 3.7% storage split before reusing those figures.
- Build a representative cross-technology project cohort before estimating why RoR/PRoR projects accumulated more readily. Current evidence supports a multi-factor account involving contracts, capital, approvals, project scale, risk allocation, land, safeguards, transmission, and state delivery capacity, but does not quantify the causal weight of each factor.
- Track project-level use of the 2082 reservoir PPA directive. Issuance is a framework signal, not evidence that the operating mix has changed.
Boundary Conditions
- This claim concerns the operating fleet, not the licensed, proposed, or construction pipeline.
- It does not say RoR or PRoR is inherently bad. Those plants added real energy and daily peaking capability.
- It does not say one PPA, policy, export incentive, institution, developer group, or actor caused the fleet mix.
- It does not convert the 97.29% outside the Kulekhani cascade into a fully audited RoR/PRoR share.
- It does not treat daily pondage as seasonal storage.