ELECTRIC TITANS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 30 December 1938, Page 7

ELECTRIC TITANS

HUGE GENERATORS BEING BUILT. DESTINED TO TAP POWER V “ AT GRAND COULEE. Westinghouse engineers are completing plans for ' building three of the world’s greatest hydroelectric generators, intended for installation at Grand Coulee, United States. Each of the main generators will have a rating of 108,000 kilovolt-amperes, approximately 30 per cent more powerful than the largest existing generators in the United States. Their combined output will equal 324,000,000 watts, enough electric power to light approximately 5,550,000 60watt lamps or supply illumination to all of New York and Chicago combined. If harnessed to a single task, the 435,000 horsepower of the trio would lift the battleship Pennsylvania (33,100 tons) more than 200 feet a minute (says the “Christian Science Monitor.”) ENGINEERS IN ACTION. When it was announced in the Westinghouse East Pittsburgh works that a £525,590 contract to build the generators and a £38,696 contract to build two smaller service generators had been received, engineers began supervising mobilisation of more than 4,500,000 pounds of steel and almost 300 miles of copper wire that will be needed for the titans.

The generators are to be installed in the west power station at Grant Coulee which, when completed, will contain nine main generators and three station-service type generators. The east station also will have nine 108,000 kilovolt-ampere Goliaths of power. 12,000 GALLONS A SECOND. If placed in one train, more than 100 freight cars will be required tc carry these power giants piece by piece, to Grand Coulee. The dam itself will be as high as a 46-storey office building, spanning the valley cut by the Columbia River for a distance of some 14 city blocks. Its 23,000,000 tons of concrete, four times the volume of the Great Pyramid, will hold back a 151-mile artificial lake reaching to the Canadian border, a reservoil capable of driving the proposed generators to some 2,700,000 horsepower. The power of the first six generator: in the west power house will be applied mainly to driving twelve 65,000 horsepower pumps, each capable of lifting 12,000 gallons of water a second out of , the Columbia River, in effect, pouring it over 1,200,000 acres of arid but potentially fertile land in the Columbia Basin.

The area to be irrigated is half again as large as Rhode Island. Even after the pumps go to work, however, there will remain more than enough water tc keep the generators in continuous operation and to double the river’s past minimum flow.