These are great news for Costa Rica, and off course for the many projects that are to be developed in the Guanacaste area; as a new reservoir could make a huge difference for the future investments in the province.

The project will be known as Rio Piedras Reservoir, and it is an initiative from the Costa Rican Institute of Electricity (I.C.E) aided by the Central American Bank for Economic Integration (BCIE) It will take an approximated time of 4 years to see it completed; or more precisely, a year to evaluate the proposal and present the different reports on the subject, approve them and finally proceed to the building part that will more likely take 3 years for its completion.

The main purpose of this new reservoir initiative in Guanacaste will be to deal with the excedent water coming from the Hydro electrical reservoir Arenal (Corobici); whose currently operational procedure sends 30 cm of “unused water” per second to the sea.

And yes that is actually a lot of water

If you are wondering why is this happening? Let me give you a brief explanation, for currently when the Arenal Reservoir produces a lot of electric power, the water used in the process overflows the irrigation channels (Hence they throw it on the sea in order to protect them.) Never the less, when the reservoir’s electric production lowers, the irrigation channels suffer from lack of water; this new initiative however would change things quite a bit, as it will collect the water in order to be used for the different irrigation projects and the local community projects in Guanacaste.

Now let’s see some numbers.

The technical analysis alone will have a cost of $400.000, and once the construction company has been chosen the project will have a 3 year “deadline”

The Rio Piedras Reservoir will have a capacity of 85 cm million of water (In an area of 800 Hectares.) will give water to 200.000 people in Guanacaste, and will have an approximate cost of $20 million.

As I mentioned before, these are great news for Costa Rica and more specifically for the province of Guanacaste, with projects like this one it won’t be long to see another boom in the real estate industry in Costa Rica.