Electricity is a key element in everyday life. Without it, we couldn’t set our alarm clocks, turn on the lights, or cook most meals. Electricity is just electricity by the time it gets to your house. But how it gets there, is very different across the four-states. We’re looking at how hydroelectric generation works.
Grand Lake in northeast Oklahoma holds millions of gallons of water. It’s an artificially created lake, designed to put those millions of gallons of water to good use. That’s where the Pensacola Dam comes in. We spoke Justin Alberty with the Grand River Dam Authority about the dam. Alberty says, before it generated electricity, it generated hundreds of jobs during a dark part of America’s history. “Pensacola Dam was constructed between 1938 and 1940, really during the Depression era, it’s the first hydroelectric facility in Oklahoma and it’s the longest, continuous multiple-arch dam in the world that stretches out for a mile across the Grand River valley.”
Once it came online, it of course, began generating power for the region. “Today, it can generate, it has capacity of about 120 megawatts total, that’s across six units in the powerhouse.”
Over the years, the dam has been modernized by GRDA. “In the late 90s, early 2000s, GRDA did a major overhaul of all six units, added new components, traded out water wheels that were iron for stainless steel, things like that, so components that are going to last longer that are more efficient. If you go in there today and you look at it, it’s going look like it did when it opened in 1940, so what I tell people is, it’s like a classic car, with a new motor under the hood.”
The way hydro electric power works is pretty straight forward. “You capture the power of falling water, it’s mechanical energy as it comes down hill and you use it to spin a turbine and that turbine as it spins, it’s connected to a shaft, that shaft is connected to a generator, and as the rotor spends inside the stator in that generator, that’s where the electricity is created.”
That makes it one of the cleanest forms of energy generation out there. Pensacola Dam however, isn’t the only power facility the GRDA utilizes. “We have this hydro facility, we have a couple others, we have Kerr Dam, we have our Salina pump storage facility, we have gas generation, we have coal generation and then we also purchase some wind power.”
Alberty says the majority of the power they generate is sold to the eastern half of the state. “In Oklahoma, we sell 15 different municipalities, spread out mostly in the eastern part of the state, so that’s where our power flows to, we also sell to all the industries in the Mid-America Industrial Park south of Pryor, Oklahoma.”
Alberty says hydro power is faster to get to the electric grid when it’s needed, because it’s a shorter turn around time to power up the generators at the dam versus heating water at a coal or gas plant to start generating steam.
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