Photos: China's Three Gorges Dam

The 185-meter-high dam has created a reservoir that can hold approximately 39 billion cubic meters of water, and should generate up to 18,200 megawatts of electricity from 26 power turbines, according to a fact sheet from Reuters. The price tag for the project, which began 13 years ago: $25 billion, the news agency says. It is widely said to be the largest dam in the world.

On the plus side of the equation, the Three Gorges Dam is a key part of Beijing's plan to generate much of its electricity from hydropower--a cleaner alternative by many measures to the coal-burning power plants for which China is notorious. By 2020, according to a story this week in The New York Times, the government aims to produce 300 gigawatts of electricity from hydropower, or almost three times as much as today.