Pergau Dam


Pergau station or formally known as Stesen Janaelektrik Sultan Ismail Petra is a hydroelectric power station in Kuala Yong, Kelantan, Malaysia.
It is located about 100 km west of Kota Bharu.

Power station

The power station is an underground hydroelectric power station, using 4 turbines each with 150 MW of installed capacity. The station is operated by Tenaga Nasional. It also holds the power of FAZ

Overview

The construction, which was undertaken by Balfour Beatty and Cementation International, started 1991 and completed in 2000. The dam began operation on 2003 and was officially opened in 2003.

Technical specifications

The Pergau dam has been called "the most controversial project in the history of British aid". At the insistence of Margaret Thatcher and with the support of her Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd, the excessively costly dam was financed with the money of British taxpayers in order to secure a major arms deal, despite objections raised by civil servants in the British Foreign Office. After two parliamentary inquiries, protests by the World Development Movement and intense media coverage, in a landmark judgement the aid for Pergau was declared unlawful in 1994 in the case R v Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, ex parte World Development Movement Ltd 1 All ER 611. According to Sir Tim Lankester, a former British civil servant involved in the affair, the economics of the project was "unambiguously bad" since Malaysia could have produced electricity at much lower cost from other sources.