Engineering in new clothes [Engineering im neuen Kleid]

Planning and implementing hydro power projects has never been easy, nor trivial. In fact, knowledge combined with experience used to be what characterised the successful engineer. But our memory of those times is fading. At any rate, engineering was governed by two main objectives: technical and economic. For at least twenty years now a continuously growing number of failed projects have demonstrated that a once-successful approach and project strategy have become inefficient and unsatisfactory. Fundamentally inadequate means can certainly continue to be applied for a limited period, but this transition time is over, and engineering can no longer be understood as a purely technico-economic challenge.