From IEEE Spectrum:
The megaproject comes online, but will it fulfill its grand promise?
In the eyes of Ethiopia’s government, the future is a 145-meter-tall monument of rolled concrete and Francis turbines that spans the Blue Nile River within a shout of the Sudanese border.
That future shifted from vision to reality on 20 February, when Ethiopian president Abiy Ahmed (a Nobel Peace Prize winner who has since come under fire for alleged war crimes in the country’s ongoing civil war) pressed a virtual button that turned on the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. GERD is by far Africa’s largest hydropower project.
That moment notwithstanding, GERD isn’t complete just yet. The dam’s reservoir is still filling, and the full force of both its power and its downstream effects is yet to be seen. And when you zoom out, Ethiopian authorities’ lack of transparency about the whole project is only clouding the future.
The GERD project is truly monumental, and not just because it’s taller than the Great Pyramid in Giza. When the dam is fully operational, its generating capacity will exceed 5,000 megawatts—at least in theory doubling Ethiopia’s electricity supply....
....MUCH MORE
I'm guessing that if Egypt thinks water that is impounded should be flowing up to the Nile Delta, it will bomb the dam.
And since multi-year dry spells are not uncommon in that part of Africa it might be a question of when, not if.
