Electric Transmission of Water Power

Published by the McGraw-Hill Book Company New York
Published by the McGraw-Hill Book Company New York
By ALTON D. ADAMS, A.M. MEMBER AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF ELECTRICAL ENGINEERS
NEW YORK McGraw-Hill Book Co. 1906
Copyrighted, 1906, by the McGRAW PUBLISHING COMPANY New York

ELECTRIC TRANSMISSION OF WATER-POWER.
Electrical supply from transmitted water-power is now distributed in more than fifty cities of North America. These include Mexico City, with a population of 402,000; Buffalo and San Francisco, with 352,387 and 342,782 respectively; Montreal, with 266,826, and Los Angeles, St. Paul, and Minneapolis, with populations that range between 100,000 and 200,000 each. North and south these cities extend from Quebec to Anderson, and from Seattle to Mexico City. East and west the chain of cities includes Portland, Springfield, Albany, Buffalo, Hamilton, Toronto, St. Paul, Butte, Salt Lake City, and San Francisco. To reach these cities the water-power is electrically transmitted, in many cases dozens, in a number of cases scores, and in one case more than two hundred miles. In the East, Canada is the site of the longest transmission, that from Shawinigan Falls to Montreal, a distance of eighty-five miles.
From Spier Falls to Albany the electric line is forty miles in length. Hamilton is thirty-seven miles from that point on the Niagara escarpment, where its electric power is developed. Between St. Paul and its electric water-power station, on Apple River, the transmission line is twenty-five miles long. The falls of the Missouri River at Cañon Ferry are the source of the electrical energy distributed in Butte, sixty-five miles away. Los Angeles draws electrical energy from a plant eighty-three miles distant on the Santa Ana River. From Colgate power-house, on the Yuba, to San Francisco, by way of Mission San José, the transmission line has a length of 220 miles. Between Electra generating station in the Sierra Nevada Mountains and San Francisco is 154 miles by the electric line.