I answer a help line for a State Environmental Agency. And I get questions that don’t deal with my Agency, but I still have to find an answer for the caller.
That being said, I’ve got someone that wants to know the hydroelectric generating capacity of each hydroelectric dam in my state. Does anyone know who I should contact about this? We have several different utility companies, so contacting them may take awhile.
Any assistance is greatly appreciated!
You must have a state utility commission who, if they can’t answer your question, can point you to someone who can.
Contact your local utility (from your location I would guess one of the Southern Company or Entergy subsidiaries) and ask. They usually make that information available.
The elevators in my building have safety certificates in them. And the power source is listed as “hydroelectric”.
I never knew you needed to a dam to power an elevator.
The Federal energy regulatory commission regulates all hydroelectric dams.
http://www.ferc.gov/hydro/hydro2.htm
The Army Corps of Engineers also keeps a database of most large dams.
I submit to you an adobe acrobat file from the US Government which lists the capacities of every single utility generating station, of all fuels, above 100kW I think:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/ipp/ipp_sum.html
and here is a similar file with all non-utility plants in the US:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/ipp/ipp_sum2.html
These will tell you what you need to know. They are heavily cross-referenced, and list generation type. So you can go to your state, in each file, and count on down for every hydro source.
Una