Hydroelectric dams are essential to preventing floods. Many of these dams are located in places that are bordered by water such as Mississippi and Ohio. Most dams are created to control river flow, improve navigation, and regulate flooding. However, some dams are built to produce hydroelectric power which is the case here (Smith).
How does hydroelectric dams work? There’s a power source that is used to turn a piece called “turbine” then turns a metal shaft to an electric generator, and that creates electricity. (Perlman) The mechanical energy converts to electricity so the water flows through the dams. It could also work without dams, which is a process known as diversion/ run-of-the-river. Meaning, some of the portions of the water from a fast flowing river can be diverted through a penstock to a turbine set in the river. (Anderson) Getting to the point, the dams works by converting the energy to electric in order for the water to flow to get to our homes.
There are a lot of pros and cons about these hydroelectric dams! Some of the pros are renewable energy sorces, dams can store rain water or water directly from the river, produces power, very few break downs and last but not least it controls flooding. These pros really help us out in a positive way. Then, there's always something bad with a good. The cons of the dams are causing the rivers to clog, it messes up natural seasonal changes in the rivers, the ecosystems could be destroyed, and dams are expensive.
There are three types of hydropower families: diversion, impoundment, and pumped storage.Some hydropower plants use dams and some do not. (Walker). The sizes varries in different sizes. For an example, a small system for a home or a small city. They're also names f...
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...urn the hydropower water into electricity to power our cars, homes and devices. In the future the development of hydropower plants will create local physical pollution. For an example, industrial structures in natural settings!
Where are hydroelectric power plants located? The biggest hydropower plant is located at the
Grand Coulee Dam which is on the Columbia River in Washington. Over seventy percent of the electricity made in Washington is produced by hydroelectric facilities (Thomas). Hydroelectric power provides about a fifth of the world's electricity. The five largest hydropower producers in 2004 were China, Canada, Brazil, Russia, and the United States.
Hydroelectric dams have a positive affect on us and our environment. Without it we would not have water running to our homes. And we wouldn't have anything to prevent floods! The dams are very helpful to us.
The one feature common to the Hoover Dam, The Mississippi river and the three gorges dam is that they all tried to control nature’s swings, specifically in the form of flooding. Before the Hoover dam was built, the Colorado river “used to flood spectacularly…but after 1900 the Colorado provoked a vehement response” (Pg 177). The response was simple, but large. The U.S. built several large dams, including the Hoover dam, on the Colorado to decrease its flooding and increase power and irrigation. Unfortunately, just as human control of the Colorado’s flooding increased, its organisms and habitats were detrimentally influenced, and the water became more and more salinated.
The negative aspects of Glen Canyon Dam greatly exceed the positive aspects. The dam’s hydroelectric power supply is only three percent of the total power used by the six states that are served by the facility. There is a surplus of power on the Colorado Plateau and with more and more power-plants being created in the western hemisphere, Glen Canyon Dam’s power is not needed (Living Rivers: What about the hydroelectric loss). Although the ‘lake’ contains twenty seven million acre feet of water, one and a half million acre feet of water are lost yearly due to evaporation and seepage into the sandstone banks surrounding the ‘lake’ (Living Rivers: What about the water supply?). The loss of that much “water represents millions, even billions of dollars” (Farmer 183). If the government were to employ more water efficient irrigation practices, as much as five million acre feet of water per year could be saved.
Grand Coulee Dam is a hydroelectric gravity dam on the Columbia River in Washington State, built by industrialist Henry J. Kaiser It is among the most famous dams in the United States. The reservoir it created is called the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Lake. The reservoir is named after the United States President who seemed to love dams and hydroelectric power and who was involved with the project through to the final completion of the dam. The dam was built as part of the Columbia Basin Project as a way to irrigate the desert areas of the Northwest United States. The dam started during the 1930s as a public works project and finished toward the beginning of World War Two. The initial construction plan was reconfigured during construction for more height. Its height was determined by the point at which the water from the reservoir began backing up into Canada. The scope and size of the dam is hard to comprehend. It is over a mile long and taller than the Great Pyramid of Giza, in fact, all the pyramids at Giza can fit within the base of the Grand Coulee Dam. The dam is so large that a truck at the base looks like a toy, this creates some perspective into the dam's true size. When the dam was completed in the early 1940s it was the largest dam in the world.
Over the years Glen Canyon Dam has been the spark for hundreds of debates, rallies, and protests. These debates have been going on for almost forty years now. The fact is that the dam created a huge lake when it was built, this is what bothers environmentalists. This lake is called Lake Powell and thousands of people depend on its tourists for income. The lake also filled up a canyon called Glen Canyon, some people say it was the most beautiful place on earth. The anti-dam side of the debate has its basis in the fact that Lake Powell is currently covering Glen Canyon. It was very remote so few people got to witness its splendor. This is probably the reason the dam was built in the first place, ignorance.
The use of turbines from dams to provide power was a brilliant idea until water levels started running lower than normal. The water waste from humanity is directly contributing to portions of it, aside from drought conditions affected by pollution, widespread fires battled, and more adds to the depletion thereof. When humanity is relying on power provided from dams to handle the demand, they are essentially relying on the assumption that water levels will always be there to provide it. The Hoover Dam provides power to the southwestern portion of the USA that has a large number of people.
Beyond all of Abbey's personal feelings and emotional memories, let us not forget about what these dams and reservoirs are providing us with-power. Electricity is extremely important to everyone. It is the reason for seemingly everything people consider vital to their lives; cars, computers, TV, running water through the faucet, everything. It is not something we can just forget about because of an author's emotional attachment to a certain strip of land sacrificed to make thousands of other people happy sitting safe in their home with electricity.
The first type of renewable energy is hydroelectric energy or well known as hydropower. In greek word, hydro means water and thus hydroelectric energy refers to electricity generated using flowing water at high velocity. Lutgens and Tarbuck (1992, p. 163) stated that “running water is of great importance to people as we depend upon rivers for energy, travel and irrigation”. Continuous availability of water in universe made water to be the main source of hydroelectric energy. Water has been widely utilized by mankind since the beginning of civilization and wate...
IYER, R.I. (19X9) "Large Dams: The Right Perspective.' Economic and Political Weekly, 14, 107- 116.
The impoundment facility is the most seen type of hydropower plant. This facility is a large hydropower system that uses a dam to store water in a reservoir. The water that is released from this reservoir then flows through a turbine, which causes it to spin, activating a generator to create electricity.
Next, hydro-electricity is electricity produced by moving water, flowing past a turbine connected to a generator (“Hydropower”). According to Nationalgeographic.c...
How exactly does hydropower work, though? As it turns out, dams are the main source of harvesting energy via hydropower. There are about 80,000 dams in the United States, although not all are active producers of power. There are four main types of hydropower facilities, which all require turbines: impoundment, diversion, run-of-river, and pumped storage. Also, there are two main types of hydro turbines: impulse turbines and reaction turbines ("Hydropower…”).
Wind turbines are a great source of energy around the world. Wind turbines produce wind energy that can be used to power our homes. Wind turbines convert kinetic energy into mechanical power. Then this mechanical power gets generated into electricity. Wind turbines make energy by the wind turning the large blades, which spin a shaft that is connected to the large blades, which then operates the generator making electricity.
Hydroelectric Power Plant is when electricity is generated when water in an uphill reservoir flows downhill. The gravitational potential energy of the water changes to kinetic energy of the flowing water which drives the turbines to generate electricity. The efficiency is more than 90%. The environmental impact is Floods large area and affects the ecology of the area, May cause drought downstream if not managed properly, does not cause ai...
Hydroelectric power seizes the buoyancy released from descending water. Two thousand years ago, Ancient Greeks utilized wooden water wheels to convert kinetic energy into mechanical energy because that’s all they had back then. However, in 1882, the first hydroelectric power plant was constructed in the United States using a fast flowing river. During that time, humans began to build dams to reserve water at the most suitable places or areas in order to best apply the power capacity. Engineering and structural changes have been increased in designing a more efficient hydroelectric power plant, but in order for that to happen they had to go through a very difficult process which can cause much conflict. (http://www.ems.psu.edu/~elsworth/courses/cause2003/finalprojects/vikingpaper.pdf)
Third of all, the water that falls in the dam can also generate electricity. For instance, 19% of world electricity comes from water. Regardless of the fact that hydroelectric power has low maintenance costs and does not pollute the environment, it can cause earthquakes, and destroy wild rivers. Only 0.3% of world energy comes from Earth.