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Parker Dam
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Parker dam is billed as the "Deepest Dam in the World"; while
the structural height is given as 320 feet, most of that is below the
original river bed. The dam extends about 85 feet above the river bed,
and the superstructure for the floodgates add another 62 feet. The crest
length is given as 856 feet, construction type is concrete thick arch
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The dam creates Lake Havasu (Lake Havasu City is now home of London
Bridge), which plays a part in water delivery to the Colorado River
Aqueduct. In fact, about half of the power genereated by the dam goes to
pumping water into the aqueduct, which supplies water to Southern
California. Nameplate capacity of the 4 turbine/generator assemblies is
given as 120 Megawatts, although "due to river conditions
downstream, the tailrace limits total plant throughput to between 102
and 108 MW". FY 2003 generation was stated to be 462,864 MWHours (Data is
here
).
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Parker and Davis Dams are both operated remotely from the Hoover Control
Center. Again, the prime purpose of the Dams and Reserviors is storage
and delivery of water. Power Produciton is strictly secondary, but then,
they don't call this the "Desert Southwest" for nothing! Water
is a precious comodity here. These are pipes from a pump station that we
think supply the Colorado River Aqueduct, bringing water to a sizeable
portion of Southern California. Before we got to the dam, we passed
another pump station, that we believe supplied water to the Central
Arizona Project. It was wierd... the river got smaller at each dam we
visited!
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Some more pix while we work on the page...
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What power is available for distribution is sold by the WAPA (here in the
southeast we have SEPA). 69 KV was a new one for us... maybe they use
that for local distribution out here because of the distances involved??
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A picture from the
USBR...
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