location: Sandouping, Yiling, Hubei

country: China

River: Yangtze

cost: USD $27.6 billion

year: 2008

installed Capacity: 22,500 MW

annual Production: 98.8 (TW-hour)

area Flooded: 1,084 (km^2)

The Three Gorges Dam is a megastructure in every sense of its word. The dam is around 2.3 kilometers (1.4 miles) long, which is 5 times longer than the Hoover Dam, and 185 meters (594 feet) tall, which is more than a hundred feet taller than the Great Pyramid of Giza. The construction of the Three Gorges Dam came at a great cost. It displaced around 1.3 million people, flooded archaeological and cultural sites, and changed the ecology of the region. But the completion of the Three Gorges Dam has also had a positive impact. It has helped control floods on the Yangtze River, where periodic flooding has caused millions of deaths in the 20th century alone. The installed powered capacity of the dam is equivalent to 20 Hoover Dams or three times the power capacity of the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power station, which as of 2018, is the largest nuclear power station ever constructed by power capacity.