Hydro Power Quotes

“Turbines designed for low-flow situations would be wasteful in times of high water. Turbines designed for high efficiency at, say, five hundred cubic feet per second might be ineffective in times of low water. Under certain conditions, turbines can go into a state of cavitation, wherein vaporizing water creates bubbles that implode on the metal and riddle it with tiny holes. The ideal turbine for a little mill up a creek somewhere in inconsistent country would be one that was prepared to take whatever might come, to sit there and react calmly in any situation, to respond evenly to wild and sudden demands, to make the best of difficult circumstances, to remain steadfast in time of adversity, to keep going, above all to press on, to persevere, and not vibrate, fibrillate, vacillate, cavitate, or panic - in short, to accept with versatile competence what is known in hydroelectrical engineering as the run of the river.”
― John McPhee, Silk Parachute

“Thoughts at a Café Table
Between the Kazan and the Iron Gates

Progress has now placed the whole of this landscape underwater. A traveller sitting at my old table on the quay at Orsova would have to peer at the scenery through a thick brass-hinged disc of glass; this would frame a prospect of murk and slime [...] Moving a couple of miles downstream, he would fumble his way on to the waterlogged island and among the drowned Turkish houses; or, upstream, flounder among the weeds and rubble choking Count Széchenyi's road and peer across the dark gulf at the vestiges of Trajan on the other side; and all round him, above and below, the dark abyss would yawn and the narrows where currents once rushed and cataracts shuddered from bank to bank and echoes zigzagged along the vertiginous clefts would be sunk in diluvian since. [...]

He could toil many days up these cheerless soundings, for Rumania and Yugoslavia have built one of the world's biggest ferro-concrete dams and hydro-electric power plants across the Iron Gates. This has turned a hundred and thirty miles of the Danube into a vast pond which has swollen and blurred the course of the river beyond recognition. It has abolished cayons, turned beetling crags into mild hills and ascended the beautiful Cerna valley almost to the Baths of Hercules. Many thousands of the inhabitabnts of Orşova and the riparian hamlets had to be uprooted and transplanted elsewhere. The islanders of Ada Kaleh have been moved to another islet downstream and their old home has vanished under the still surface as though it has never been. Let us hope that the power generated by the dam has spread well-being on either bank and lit up Rumanian and Yugoslav towns brighter than ever before because, in everything but economics, the damage is irreparrable.

[... M]yths, lost voices, history and hearsay have all been put to rout, leaving nothing but this valley of shadow. Goethe's advice, 'Bewahre Dich vor Räuber und Ritter und Gespenstergeschichten',* has been taken literally, and everything has fled.

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* Beware of the robber, the cavalier, and ghost stories.”
― Patrick Leigh Fermor, Between the Woods and the Water