On January 23 we got to tour the
TVA Raccoon Mountain Pumped Storage Facility. After getting lost a couple of
times, we finally made it! When we arrived, our tour guide familiarized us with
some TVA history. We first learned that very few people got to go on this tour
and we felt very lucky. Next he told us that Chattanooga was prone to flooding
and used to suffer bad floods before TVA made dams in the area. During the Great Depression, our area had a big
flood and didn’t recover, but TVA helped. They began construction for some of
the dams in the 1930s and 40s. The
building of this dam provided jobs for many people that would have otherwise
been without work.
Now, TVA works to make sure that
they are stewards of the river. They maintain aquatic life, regulate
temperature, and balance demands such as how much water flows in and out of the
river. This pump water storage facility also provides low cost hydro-generation
electricity, which is electricity made by water. To get this special kind of
energy, they pull the water from the Tennessee River (Nickajack Lake) and pump
it 1 ½ miles into the mountain and 1000 feet above the river.
On the mountain, there is a
reservoir where the pumped water waits to be used. When electricity is needed,
the water flows out of the reservoir and down through the turbine which is
attached to an electromagnet generator which is like a wheel that has magnets
and copper wiring inside it to make electricity. The stronger the magnet the more electricity.
TVA can control how much
electricity is made by how much water is released. At times of high demands,
such as early in the morning when people are getting ready for work and school,
more electricity is needed so more water is released. Temperature also
determines how much electricity is made. Sometimes if they miscalculate the
temperature, they make to little or to much energy and have to buy or sell
more.
This facility actually uses more
energy than it produces but it can produce energy at the peak times so less
energy has to be purchased from nearby areas to meet our local electricity
demand.
There are not many places like this
in the country. Pumped storage facilities can hold up to 16 megawatts of
electricity. Now that is a lot!
After he talked to us a little bit
about the dams and pumped storage facilities, we got to go inside the mountain!
We learned that weirs, low dams
built across the water, measure the water flow in the mountain. Also, penstocks
are kind of floodgates that regulate the flow of a body of water and monitor
pressure in the mountain. We even saw a place where oil was seeping naturally
out of the rock.
It was really neat to be able to
actually go inside the mountain where electricity is generated and the Tucker
River Fellows were really excited about this opportunity to learn about the
Raccoon Mountain Pump Storage Plant.
We rode the
elevator from the bottom of the mountain to the top and this was the equivalent
of 38 floors!
