Плотина Мероэ: Крупнейший гидроэнергетический проект Африки.

The Merowe Dam, also known as Merowe High Dam, Merowe Multi Purpose Hydro Project or Hamdab Dam, is a large dam near Merowe Town in northern Sudan, about north of the capital Khartoum. Its dimensions make it the largest contemporary hydropower project in Africa. It is situated on the river Nile, close to and inundating the 4th Cataract where the river divides into multiple smaller branches with large islands in between. Merowe is a city about downstream from the construction site at Hamdab. The main purpose for building the dam was the generation of electricity.

The dam has a length of about and a crest height of up to It consists of concrete faced rockfill dams on each river bank (the right bank dam is the largest part of the project, 4.3 km long and 53m high; the left bank is 1590 metres long and 50 metres high), an long high earth core rockfill dam (the 'main dam') in the left river channel, and a live water section in the right river channel (sluices, spillway and a 300 metre power intake dam with turbine housings). It contains a reservoir of , or about 15% of the Nile's annual flow of ; the intended reservoir level is 300 metres above sea level, with the Nile level downstream of the dam being about 265 metres. The reservoir lake is planned to extend upstream.

The powerhouse is equipped with ten Francis turbines, each one designed for a nominal discharge rate of 300 cubic metres per second, and each one driving a 150 MVA, 15 kV synchronous generator. The planners expect an annual electricity yield of , corresponding to an average load of , or 50% of the rated load. To utilize the extra generation capacity, the Sudanese power grid will be upgraded and extended as part of the project, with about of new 500 kV aerial transmission line across the Bayudah Desert to Atbara, continuing to Omdurman/Khartoum, as well as about of 220 kV lines eastwards to Port Sudan and westwards along the Nile, connecting to Merowe, Dabba and Dongola.

The electrification level in Sudan is very low, even by the standards of the region. In 2002, the average Sudanese consumed 58 kWh of electricity per year, i. e., about one fifteenth of their Egyptian neighbors to the north, and less than one hundredth of the OECD average. The capital Khartoum and a few large plantations account for more than two thirds of the country's electric power demand, while most of the rural areas are not connected to the national grid. Many villages use the option of connecting small generators to the ubiquitous diesel powered irrigation pumps. This way of generating electricity is rather inefficient and expensive. The combined grid connected generating capacity in Sudan was 728 MW in 2002, about 45% hydroelectricity and 55% oil fired thermal plants. However, the effective capacity has always been a lot lower. The two main facilities, the Sennar (constructed in 1925) and Roseires (1966) dams on the Blue Nile, were originally designed for irrigation purposes rather than power production. Generating units were added during the 1960s and 1970s when the demand for electric power increased, but their power production is often heavily restricted by irrigation needs. The government in Khartoum has announced plans to raise the country's electrification level from an estimated 30% to about 90% in the mid term. Large investments into the medium and low voltage distribution grids will be necessary but not sufficient to reach this ambitious goal: First and foremost, the foreseeable increase in power consumption would require the addition of generating capacity. During the 1990s, Sudanese electricity customers have already been plagued by frequent blackouts and brownouts due to insufficient generation. Three new thermal power plants went into operation in the Khartoum area in 2004, increasing the installed capacity to 1315 MW. The Merowe dam with its peak output of 1250 MW will almost double this capacity once it comes online.

Before the construction began, an estimated 55,000 to 70,000 people were resident in the area covered by the reservoir lake, mainly belonging to the Manasir, Hamadab and Amri tribes. They lived in small farming villages along the banks of the Nile and on the islands in the cataract. The whole region was relatively isolated, without paved roads or other infrastructure, and the communities were largely self sufficient. Except for beans and millet the farmers grew vegetables, both for their own consumption and for trading at the weekly regional markets. However, their main source of income—and their most valuable possession—were the groves of date palms growing in the fertile silt on the river banks. The inhabitants of the region to be flooded were forcibly displaced along a timeline corresponding to their land's proximity to the dam site: the people of Hamadab to Al Multaga in 2003, the people of Amri to Wadi Muqaddam in 2007, and the Manasir to Al Mokabrab and Al Fidah in 2008. At the resettlement sites, farmers received plots of land relative in size to their former possessions, in addition to financial compensation for lost assets—houses and date palms. However, a majority preferred to stay near to their old grounds as possible and have thus built at the shores of the new lake. Many families have defied resettlement and live now on the margins of the lake. Farmers have become fishermen, but their income is less than before. After this period, the farmers would have to pay the full price for these services, none of which had to be paid at the old site. Compensation for a date palm amounts to about four years' harvest, while a good palm tree can bear fruit for a hundred years. Compensation for vegetable gardens is very low, and only married men will receive compensation for their houses. About 6,000 people were resettled to the Al Multaqah site in the Nubian desert during 2003 and 2004. Their villages were the closest to the dam construction site near Hamdab. According to a survey conducted in early 2005, the poverty rate has increased dramatically because the farmers are not able to produce anything saleable in the local markets. Kothari announced, "The affected people have claimed that they received no warning that water levels would be raised and that no assistance from Government authorities has been forthcoming since their houses were destroyed." According to reports, the Government of Sudan has not honored its promises to those who have been displaced. Kothari noted that, "thousands of people in the same area were relocated in similar circumstances that left many temporarily without food or shelter, and that some of those people remain homeless today." The archaeologists working for the dam project found themselves in an ethical dilemma since they were undertaking salvage excavations while the local people were in opposition to the building of the dam that necessitates both their resettlement and the archaeological campaign. negotiated by the British in 1959. It allots 82 percent of the water volume to Egypt, while Sudan is granted the rights to the remaining 18 percent. None of the riparian countries further upstream in the Nile basin—Ethiopia, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Kenya and Tanzania—are entitled to any significant use of the water, be it for irrigation (of particular interest to Ethiopia and Kenya) or hydropower (Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda). As Sudan now pushes forward to make use of its water allotment, those countries have begun to call for a revision of the treaty, arguing that—with the exception of Ethiopia—they had all been under colonial rule at the time the negotiations took place, and had not been represented in their best interest. Moreover, the decision of distribution of water was made without any negotiations with Ethiopia, which had rejected the agreement and is the source of 90% of the water and 96% of transported sediment of the Nile.

While a peace treaty seems to have stopped the fighting in Southern Sudan after almost 20 years, there is no end in sight yet for the civil war in the western Darfur province. More recently, unrest in Nubia as a direct result of the dams and the forced permanent displacement of Nubians from their homelands threatens to erupt into war. A group calling itself the Nubian Liberation Front is threatening armed resistance in order to thwart the series of dams along the Nile, and particularly at Kajbar.

The resettlement area is a vast area with an expected 50,000–70,000 inhabitants who would be going through a transitional period for a few years before the get acclimatised and psychologically adapted to their new life. Governing by the two eminent health impact experiences of New Halfa resettlement projects and Aswan Dam in Egypt, strategic health planning ought to start early to foresee what water born diseases and other ecological health problems (such as bilharziasis, malaria) are likely to prevail and to plan how to guard against that.

The creation of the reservoir lake will increase the surface area of the Nile by about 700 km2. Under the climatic conditions at the site, additional evaporation losses of up to 1,500,000,000 m3 per year can be expected. This corresponds to about 8% of the total amount of water allocated to Sudan in the Nile Waters Treaty.