Power station taps Niagara

Harnessing North America’s most voluminous waterfalls to produce more than 1GW of electricity from one power station wasn’t an easy task.

Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse had built the first hydro-electric plant at Niagara Falls in 1895 and several others followed. But the post-war recovery of the 1940s and 1950s left the US and Canada hungry for more power.

Opened in 1954 by the Duchess of Kent and 25 tons of explosives, the Sir Adam Beck - Niagara No. 2 cost almost $344m and eventually had a generating capacity of 1,370MW. Although today dwarfed by China’s 22,500MW Three Gorges Dam, Adam Beck 2 was, at the time, one of the world’s largest hydro-electric plants. In 1965, a faulty transmission line from the station would leave 30 million people without electricity.

But, as The Engineer reported in October 1954, ’the great size of the power station is not by any means its only claim to the interest of the engineer, for various technical problems of unusual difficulty had to be solved in its design and construction’.