I have before me a schedule of the rates charged in the twelve largest cities of the province. For domestic service the average net cost ranges from 1.3 cents per kilowatt hour to 2.8 cents per kilowatt hour. The rates vary chiefly with distance. Toronto, ninety miles from Niagara, pays 2.1 cents per kilowatt hour, while Windsor, two hundred and fifty miles to the west, opposite Detroit, Michigan, is charged 2.6 cents. Commercial users, such as stores and office buildings, pay slightly higher rates, while factories are charged from $11.75 to $28.66 per horse-power per year. As with commercial companies, the “Hydro” rates decrease with the amount of power used. For households the secondary or larger-user rate is nowhere more than 1.8 cents, and in most places it is less. In Toronto, the average household electric light bill is less than a dollar and a quarter a month. At Windsor it is less than a dollar and three quarters. In the city of London, Ontario, the household consumption of electricity has under “Hydro” increased more than four hundred per cent. and the average cost has been reduced to less than one fourth of the former charges.
CHAPTER XV
NIAGARA’S GIANT POWER STATION
“Hydro’s” biggest feat in physical construction is the great development, known as the Queenston Chippewa plant, on the Niagara River. This station is designed to produce six hundred thousand horse-power, or about one sixth as much as all the electrical energy now generated in Canada. Suppose we visit it with one of the engineers. Stepping into an automobile, we drive first toward the falls, now partly obscured in the clouds of mist from the tumbling, roaring, boiling waters. Our way lies through the park the Canadians have made so that the people may enjoy for all time the approaches to this monarch among the wonders of Nature.
We stop at Chippewa, at the mouth of the Welland River. This stream used to empty into the Niagara River above the falls, but to-day its channel carries the water diverted from the Niagara for the supply of the power station. The river was deepened and widened for a distance of four and a half miles, and then a canal was dug through the remaining eight and a half miles to the site of the plant. Now we turn back, and as our car passes over one of the numerous bridges across the big ditch, we look down upon a miniature Panama Canal, fifty feet wide at water level, and thirty-nine feet deep. In many places it was cut through hills of rock to a depth of more than one hundred feet. When the station is operated at full capacity, the flow of water through the canal is more than twice that of the Connecticut River.
Seven miles below the falls we come to the power plant. If your nerves are steady, walk out to the cliff and see where we are. Look first across the great gorge. Those hills over there are in the state of New York. See their steep, rocky sides, with van-coloured strata exposed by the wearing action of the Niagara River through millions of years. To our left, and hardly a mile away, the high plateau suddenly drops off; below it are the glistening waters of Lake Ontario. We are near the end of the escarpment over which Niagara Falls once plunged into the lake.
Now look straight down; the Niagara River is three hundred feet below us. From this height it looks like an innocent stream. It is really a raging torrent in the final throes of its mad struggle to get into Lake Ontario. The workmen clinging to the sheer, rocky face of the cliff under our feet, and boring into it with their drills, seem like huge insects using their stingers. That big block of concrete, resting on a shelf carved out of the rock and washed by the current, is the power station. It has the dimensions of an eighteen-story office building, and part of it is lower than the surface of the river.
The huge steel penstocks, or pipes, through which the water rushes to the waterwheels below, are set in grooves cut in the rock. Each of them is twice the diameter of a big dining-room table. The water enters the penstocks from a great pool fed by the canal and, dropping, creates this mighty stream of electrical energy, which surpasses any that can be produced right at the Falls. The reason for this is that while the total drop in the Niagara River is three hundred and twenty-seven feet, the height of the Falls is only one hundred and sixty-seven feet. That is the maximum “head” of water available to the power stations located right at the Falls. But from where we stand the drop to the waterwheels is exactly three hundred and five feet, or nearly twice as great as that at the falls. This station, in other words, utilizes all except about twenty feet of the difference in level between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. It does this by taking in the water of the Niagara River at Chippewa and carrying it for thirteen miles nearly to the end of the Niagara escarpment. There is a fall of only twelve feet in the whole length of the canal.
Every cubic foot of water per second that flows through the penstocks generates thirty horse-power, as compared with about sixteen horse-power per foot per second developed by the stations nearer the falls. The Canadians are thus making the water of Niagara work for the people at almost twice the efficiency ever obtained from its waters before.
Let us see just what this means. An ordinary pail holds about one cubic foot of water. Suppose, as we stand on the brink of the gorge, I hand you pails full of water, and that you let them fall, one every second, to the river below. If the force of this fall could be applied to a machine as efficiently as flowing water, each pailful would generate electricity to the amount of thirty horse-power, or an amount about equal to the energy of a five-passenger touring car when run at full speed. Imagine twenty thousand such pailfuls being fed into the penstocks every time your watch ticks, and you will then understand what the six hundred thousand horse-power capacity of this station means.
Step with me into the electric elevator that goes down the face of the cliff to the power house. At the bottom we find the offices of the engineers and experts in charge. There is, also, a restaurant for the workers. One huge room is filled with the switches and recorders which keep these men constantly informed of conditions in all parts of the plant and enable them to control every detail. We descend still farther to the lower levels, where are the giant waterwheels and generators. We prowl around in vast subterranean chambers and gaze at one of the sixty-thousand-horse-power generators. There is no visible motion and almost no sound, yet it is producing enough power to move at high speed a procession of two thousand motor cars, or to drive two Majesties or Leviathans across the ocean.