Word: dam
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...structure sits unobtrusively at one end of the Great Stone Dam, a 900-ft-long, 40-ft.-high granite block structure that spans the broad Merrimack River. When that old dam was built in 1848, it was the engineering marvel of its time and provided mechanical power for the surrounding textile mills of Lawrence. But the dam fell into relative disuse in the 1950s, when the city's thriving textile industry withered as factories moved south...
...group of six Massachusetts investors approached the Essex Co., an old-line New England firm that had initially built and continued to own the dam, with a proposal to build a hydroelectric plant there. Company stockholders were receptive because the dam faced financial troubles. The Department of the Interior had ordered the company to construct a $1.5 million fish ladder to help the Merrimack River's growing schools of Atlantic salmon move upstream to spawn. The company stockholders agreed to sell out to the investment group, which later formed a partnership with E G & G, a Wellesley, Mass., energy...
...ambitious Lawrence dam partners now have several more hydropower sites in New England under development. They are building a $6.3 million project on the Contoocook River near Concord, N.H., and a $2 million one on the Wells River in Vermont. The two dams will serve a total of about 5,000 customers...
...hydroelectric-power generation in New England is due in part to advances in turbine technology for "low head" dams. The new turbines produce electricity by having water flow horizontally, under modest pressure, against the blades of the turbine. The machines look something like submarines sitting on the bed of the river. Traditional hydroelectric dams like the Hoover Dam on the Arizona-Nevada border must be hundreds of feet tall so that the water can fall from great height and with huge force and speed against the turbines. Although low-head dams are widely used in Europe, relatively few of those...
...about to free the U.S., or even New England, from its dependence on either nuclear power or imported oil. Less than 5% of the region's electrical power now comes from hydroelectric sites. The New England River Basins Commission has made an inventory of the 10,000 dam sites in the region's six states and concluded that only 320 of the dams are now economically feasible. If those were developed, water-energy production would rise to only about 7% of daily usage. But even that amount would mean that the U.S. could import 3.5 million fewer barrels...