photo via ben cooper’s flickr

Deep inside the mountain is an 800m shaft, about 30m wide. During times of excess energy on the National Grid, water from the lake below is pumped up into the reservoir above the shaft. And when a surge of energy is needed on the grid, (say during a football match half-time), it’s released back into the lake, hurtling through the turbines and generating up to 1,320 MW from standstill in 12 seconds.

This isn’t all that surprising, after all it is how all watertowers work, but the name, Electric Mountain, the description of the semi-audible humming present at the site which is somewhere between hearing and feeling, gives the whole place a Tarkovskian type feeling of the Zone.

The wikipedia article about the Dinorwig Power Station has more details.

After we climbed out, I asked about the lake below. “You could say that it’s tidal, but with the television schedules, rather than the moon.”

Mind is blown.

via tom taylor

tags:electricity geography infrastructure mountain nature

Written by admin (contact).

It was written on November 30th, 2010 at 7:14 pm
Filed in the Category geo, interesting