Robert Moses Hydro-Electric Dam
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Robert Moses Hydro-Electric Dam is a hydroelectric station in Niagara Falls, New York. The station diverts water from Niagara River above Niagara Falls and returns the water into the lower portion of the river near Lake Ontario.
This facility is not a typical dam, in that it was constructed not to control the flow of water in a natural river, but rather to contain a man-made reservoir which stores the water diverted through a tunnel from a point upstream on the Niagara River. The opposite boundary of this lagoon is another dam, the Lewiston Pump-Generating Plant, which houses a set of electrically powered pumps that can move water to another higher storage lake behind this second dam.
At night, a substantial fraction of the water in the Niagara River is diverted to the lower reservoir, and electricity generated in the Moses plant is used to power the pumps to push water into the reservoir behind the Lewiston dam. This mode of operation takes place at night only to preserve the appearance of Niagara Falls. Electricity from the Moses plant can be applied to this purpose because the general demand for electricity is lower at night. During the following day, when electrical demand is high, water is released from the upper reservoir through generators in the Lewiston dam. That same water flows into the main reservoir, where it falls again through the turbines of the Moses plant. Some would say that the water is 'used twice.'
This ingenious system allows energy to be stored in vast quantities: At night, the potential energy in the diverted water is converted into electrical energy in the Moses plant. Some of that electrical energy is used to create potential energy when the water is pumped into the reservoir behind the Lewiston dam. During the day, part of the potential energy of the water in the Lewiston reservoir lake is converted into electricity at the Lewiston dam, and then its remaining potential energy is captured by the Moses dam, which is also capturing the potential energy of the water diverted from the river in real-time.
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