1/29/2024 0 Comments Power company chicago 1930Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006.ĭick, Wesley Arden. Big Dams of the New Deal Era: A Confluence of Engineering and Politics. But large power dams were also contested spaces that raised a number of thorny questions: Who should benefit from federally-built power plants? Should public agencies or private energy companies sell the power and determine rates? How would dramatically transformed river systems accommodate a multitude of legal claims to the river’s water and fisheries? Were dams more environmentally destructive than they were economically productive? Many of these questions remain with us.īillington, David P. Mid-century Americans believed them so successful that hydropower dams formed a basis for the country’s postwar foreign policy of economic development. Building regional-scale power dams exhibited an unparalleled engineering aptitude that produced rapid economic growth. Most Americans lauded the large-scale environmental transformations necessary to harness the power of rivers. Collectively, they helped complete the West’s transformation into an agricultural and industrial powerhouse. Many of these dams, exemplified by the 710-foot-high Glen Canyon Dam, were enormous. They transformed each of these river systems into a staircase of energy-generating reservoirs. Between 19, the Reclamation Bureau and Army Corps of Engineers built more than 150 dams on the Columbia, Missouri, and Colorado River basins. Over the postwar decades, the use of public works as a mode of economic stimulus dramatically expanded. They powered booming industrial growth for wartime manufacturing that permanently reorganized regional economies around energy-intensive industries such as aluminum, aircraft production, and the finished electrical appliances that fueled new demands for residential power. These and other Depression-era dams produced immense energy in search of markets just in time for World War II. Grand Coulee alone could generate 2,253 megawatts of power, roughly equivalent to the entire Tennessee Valley Authority. On the Columbia River basin, two major dams-Bonneville and Grand Coulee-brought dreams of economic wealth to the little developed Pacific Northwest. The Central Valley Project in California, which rearranged the state’s hydraulic system, dwarfed the Hoover Dam. In the 1930s, emergency funds brought multiple large-scale dam projects to realization. It was the world’s first “high dam,” made possible by an interstate agreement, federal involvement through the Reclamation Bureau, and Southern California’s energy market. Approved in 1928 but built during the early years of the Great Depression, Hoover Dam linked job creation and economic growth through public works, making it a model for further federal involvement in regional-scale multipurpose dam projects. The awesome scale of Hoover Dam captivated contemporaries: double the volume of any prior dam, Hoover held back the world’s largest artificial lake (Lake Mead) and increased, at a single site, the hydropower supply of the American West by nearly fifty percent. Particularly in the American West, hydropower came to underwrite the large-scale multipurpose dam projects that drove regional growth. Selling the potential energy held in a large reservoir could help these large-scale water management projects pay for themselves. Over the first third of the twentieth century, planners began designing dams that combined their hydropower function with other societal goals, such as navigation, flood control, irrigation, and urban water supply. Progressives promoted centralized federal dams as a means to establish publicly-owned power and to electrify rural areas, making dams prominent objects of antimonopoly politics and social reform.īut hydropower was also an engine of developmental politics. Power dams offered cheap, pollution-free, and renewable energy sources. Hydroelectric power, or “white coal,” offered an alternative to fossil fuel-powered electric energy that, for progressive-age Americans, promised social and environmental benefits. Shortly after the turn of the twentieth century, a combination of large dams, powerful turbines, and high-tension transmission lines enabled electrical utilities to harness enormous energy from running water and to distribute power more than a hundred miles from electric generators. Hoover, however, was a culmination of larger technological and political changes. Symbolically, the era commenced with Hoover Dam’s dedication in 1935. The era of large-scale hydroelectric dam building spanned roughly four decades, from the 1930s through the 1960s.
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