Critics from industry and academia are raising questions about studies from the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School that criticize hydropower-dam megaprojects for chronic cost overruns and as being examples of vulnerable megaprojects. The list of objections includes the research methods—for instance, the authors do not divulge their data set of dams—and broader issues, such as the long-term benefits of large megaprojects.
The first Oxford research study, “Should We Build More Dams? The Actual Cost of Hydropower Megaproject Development” by Atif Ansar, Bent Flyvbjerg, Alexander Budzier and Daniel Lunn, first appeared in 2014 in Energy Policy, a peer-reviewed journal. It looked at 245 dams in 65 countries built between 1934 and 2007. The paper concludes that the true cost of large hydropower dams is too high to be fiscally responsible for most countries. The same research team continued its work on the topic in a 2016 study, called "Big Is Fragile: An Attempt at Theorizing Scale," which identified hydro dams as being the among projects with the highest risks.