About Hydro Electric

This is an introduction to Hydro Electric,
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Electricity from Water?
How we make Power from Nature
In 1820 a Danish physicist, Oersted, found that a wire carrying an electric current would act like a magnet. If a compass needle was placed under a live wire, the needle would turn until it was at right angles to the wire. Electricity could produce Magnetism.

Eleven years later, Michael Faraday discovered that by plunging a bar-magnet into a coil of wire he could produce electricity. Magnetism produced a wave of Electricity. The first useful generator was devised by Pixii, a French instrument maker, in 1832. By 1882, Edison had pioneered public electricity supply in Lower Manhattan, New York.

Magnets and stationary coils are still used in today's power generators. In a Power Station, turbines produce mechanical energy to turn the generators which convert it to electrical energy. The rate of exchange is 1 horsepower to 746 Watts. A domestic electric fire requires the equivalent of 1.3 horsepower.

For generators to produce electricity, they require energy to drive the turbines and, in hydro stations, this is produced by water from a reservoir. A dam is built to contain the water in a valley loch. A tunnel at the base of the dam allows water to flow to the power station, where it drives the turbines and generator to produce electricity. The tunnel then returns the water to a river or the loch.

Scottish Hydro-Electric can produce nearly 1100 MW of electricity from 54 hydro power stations and is the UK's largest generator of renewable energy.