Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
cause after 1892 mining facilities and new urban centers incited a “demand for power”
for mining equipment, industrial machinery, and electric lights. 55 Others have linked Cali-
fornia's agricultural production to private utility companies: Fruit growers needed electri-
city to pump groundwater to irrigate crops. 56 But streetcar patrons, more than lighting con-
sumers, were the greatest engines of change for urban energy consumption, particularly
after Richmond, Virginia, put the first commercially viable electric streetcar line in the Un-
ited States into service in 1888. 57 Initially, coal-fired steam plants powered these transport-
ation networks, but as these systems expanded in cities such as Atlanta, cheaper water-
generated electricity supplemented or replaced coal-generated electricity. And by 1896
the world's most anticipated, politicized, and publicized hydroelectric project—Niagara
Falls—began generating and transmitting electricity to Buffalo, New York. 58
Engineers laboring in the American South joined colleagues working around the country
and continued to improve upon existing technological systems that reconfigured the indus-
trial geography of energy production and consumption. On June 22, 1894, the Columbia
(S.C.) Cotton Mill's owners could boast of having electrified the first cotton mill in the
Southeast. Engineers designed a small hydroelectric station along the Columbia Canal to
transmit electricity to a cotton mill only 800 feet from the Broad River's current. 59 New
and continually modified technologies, including turbines, generators, transformers, high-
tension transmission lines, and electric motors, increasingly enabled factories and mills to
slip the restraints of geography and move from riverbanks to towns of all sizes. Despite
these improvements, the basic process of making hydroelectricity has not changed. Dams
store water before directing it through a penstock—that is, a large pipe—to a turbine. After
succumbing to gravity in the penstock, the falling water turns a turbine that is connected to
a generator, where spinning magnets produce electricity. Transformers step up the voltage
and send the electricity out and across transmission lines to another transformer that de-
creases the voltage for use in homes, businesses, or factories to drive electric motors in
appliances and machinery. Hydroelectric systems in the Southeast, a region with plenty of
water, became increasingly organized and capitalized after 1890, with plenty of room for
technological innovations at each of these stages. With larger arrangements came highly
centralized management, capital, and corporate power. 60 Privately managed water conser-
vation regimes quickly began to rearrange regional industrial geography and energy con-
sumption as well as social and environmental relationships between people and waterways
in the New South.
William Church Whitner (1864-1940) was the New South engineer who significantly
upscaled the production of hydroelectricity. Unlike earlier waterpower and hydroelectric
projects—such as the Columbia, South Carolina, cotton mill—that supplied energy to
factories located along rivers, Whitner's Savannah River basin projects injected significant
distance between energy production and consumption, and he leaned on transnational tech-
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