CHINESE RENEWABLE POWER GIANT BUILDS GLOBAL EMPIRE

BEIJING— Other investors are wary of Brazil, but when Duke Energy wanted to sell 10 hydroelectric dams there, a Chinese utility shrugged off the country’s economic turmoil and paid $1.2 billion to add them to an energy empire that stretches from Malaysia to Germany to the Amazon.

State-owned China Three Gorges (CTG) Group is spending heavily to buy or build hydro, wind and solar projects at a time when Western utility investors are pulling back and Presidentelect Donald Trump’s pledge to revive coal use has raised doubt about US support for renewables.

“They’re happy to invest wherever they see value or they can gain a foothold,” said Andrew Shepherd, who follows the global utility industry for BMI Research.

Flush with cash and willing to tolerate risks that put off older rivals, CTG and other stateowned utilities including State Grid Corp., the world’s biggest power supplier, are expanding abroad in search of new revenue sources as economic growth and electricity demand at home cool.

A decade ago, they built dams and power plants in Asia and Africa. Now, they also are taking on a longer-term role as operators of power companies in Europe and Australia and are looking at the US market. They are providing welcome investment in troubled markets such as Brazil and southern Europe.

Set up in 1993 to run the vast Three Gorges Dam in central China, CTG is unusual in its status as a national-level Chinese power company with global ambitions but a reliance on nonfossil-fuels sources.

The company still gets most of its 60 gigawatts of generating capacity from dams. Its namesake 46-gigawatt facility on the Yangtze River competes with Brazil’s Itaipu Dam for the title of world’s biggest hydropower facility.

Such projects face a backlash over environmental damage and forced relocation of local communities.

In August, Brazil’s environmental agency rejected a proposal by CTG and Portugal’s national power company, Energias de Portugal, to build the 8-gigawatt Sao Luis do Tapajos Dam on the Amazon. The dam would have flooded land belonging to Munduruku Indians.

CTG, which says it is active in 40 countries, started investing in wind power in 2007 and solar in 2011—projects that are easier and more politically attractive.