India will send Nepal 654 MW a day until December after the Trishuli flood

India's Ministry of Power said on Monday that it has approved electricity exports to Nepal of up to 654 megawatts for 18 hours a day from 13 September through 31 December. Up to 600 MW will move on the Muzaffarpur-Dhalkebar 400 kV double-circuit line. Up to 54 MW will move on the Tanakpur-Mahendranagar 132 kV single-circuit line. The daily window runs from midnight to 6 p.m. The volume from January 2027 will be reviewed in December.

The decision advances a seasonal swap that normally starts in October, when Nepal's rivers fall and its winter generation drops. This year the request came early. A glacial collapse on the China-Nepal border on 26 August sent floodwater down the Trishuli and Lhende Khola basins. The ministry said the flood cut about 550 MW from Nepal's operating plants. Reuters, citing the wider damage, said more than 12 hydropower stations were swept or crippled and that hydropower had supplied almost all of Nepal's electricity before the disaster.

Deaths in Nepal and Tibet have been put near 1,300 to 1,400. Hundreds of power-station workers are among several thousand people still listed as missing. Nepal's Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment for the Rasuwa-Bhotekoshi flood estimated total damage near $2.7 billion, with $1.81 billion in physical destruction and $883 million in economic losses. The energy sector alone accounted for $889 million of physical damage and $108 million of economic loss, with an estimated annual generation loss of 2,520 gigawatt-hours. Installed and operating capacity before the flood was about 4,200 MW.

For most of the last decade the political story on this border was the reverse flow. Nepal sold surplus monsoon power into India and bought a smaller volume back in winter. After 26 August Kathmandu halted exports and asked Delhi to bring the winter import window forward. The 654 MW approval is that request in writing. It is also a test of the two cross-border lines that already exist. If they run at the stated heads for 18 hours a day through December, Nepal covers a large part of the hole left by the wrecked plants. If congestion or outages cut the flow, load-shedding returns to the cities that had grown used to a surplus.

The ministry called the approval a way to meet Nepal's need and to keep energy cooperation intact. That sentence is true and incomplete. The incomplete part is the reconstruction bill. Nepali officials have said they will ask richer states and multilateral lenders to help fund an early rebuilding package they have placed near $5 billion, on the argument that a glacial flood is a climate event rather than a local engineering failure. India's electrons through December do not pay for new turbines. They keep the lights on while that larger ask is negotiated.

The number to watch in December is not only the megawatt review. It is how much of the 550 MW of lost plant is back on the river by then. If the wrecked stations stay offline into 2027, the winter import from India stops being an emergency bridge and becomes the base load of a country that had just started to sell power the other way.