kai Kensavaong will never walk along the muddy lanes of Sop On, the village in southern Laos where she was born. Her old home now lies at the bottom of a reservoir created to feed a hydroelectric power plant. the first to be funded by the World Bank for over twenty years. "I'll never forget that place," says the 41-year-old villager. "It was my home. I picked my first bamboo stalks there The World Bank stopped financing hydropower projects in developing countries twenty years ago because of criticism that such projects were harming local communities and the environment But Nam Theun 2-a 7-foot-high (39 m) dam on the Mekong River that generates over 1,000 megawatts of electricity-is the showpiece for the bank's new policy of supporting sustainable hydropower projects. For Laos, is part of a longer-term strategy to revitalize the economy and become the battery of Southeast Asia. The bank says that lessons have been learned from in the sixties and seventies, when people were to resettle and whole areas of forest or agricultural land were flooded. When it comes to clean energy, the bank thinks is the best option, offering the best solution to the 1.5 billion people without access to electricity In 2010, Nam Theun brought s5.6 million in sales of electricity, and it is estimated that during the next 25 years it will around $2 billion in revenue one of Asia's generate of the electricity will poorest countries, since most Thailand. The exported to its neighbor, will be spent on government has promised that this money the country's reducing poverty and renewing and improving infrastructure seventeen villages in the flooded area have now been rebuilt people, mostly farmers, who lived in them and the 6,200 ve been retrained to make a living from the reservoir