Hydroelectric power plants

ELECTRIC UTILITY SYSTEMS on the North American continent derive their power supply predominantly from generating stations of either the steam-electric or hydroelectric type. It happens that in some utilities the one type predominates, while in others it may be almost or even completely absent. Consequently, the system engineer and power plant designer may acquire a full familiarity with the problems of location, design, and interconnection with the system of the one type of plant, while being less familiar with the problems associated with the other. It is assumed that the readers of this article are fully familiar with steam-electric plant problems, but would be interested in a general outline of some of the variations encountered in hydroelectric plant design.