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While I don’t consider myself illiterate, I will admit that there is much I don’t know about energy. For instance, my husband recently took a tour of the Grand Coulee dam in WA state, where the docent told him that the dam was capable of providing electricity for most of the West coast, but the power goes unused. She said that Puget Power buys the power from just one turbine, but there is much more available.

So, why are we worrying about alternative energy, when we have more readily available power than we need?

On July 29th of this year, Puget Power used a little more than half of Grand Coulee’s installed generating capacity of 6809 MW.

In comparison, Duke Energy’s Bad Creek Hydroelectric Station on the SC-NC border is a 1,065-megawatt pumped-storage facility which uses surplus power from the Oconee nuclear plant (three reactors) to pump water from Lake Jocassee up 1000 feet+ into the Bad Creek reservoir. Then during the times of peak demand later in the day, the water runs back through the turbine pumps generating 330MW per turbine (at full pond) for each of the four turbines.

"where the docent told him that the dam was capable of providing electricity for most of the West coast"

Grand Coulee is big, massive really. Easily the biggest in the US, and one of the biggest in the world, but I think that statement is either a profound exaggeration, or a misunderstanding.

The biggest (and it is gigantic) dam in the world is the Three Gorges Dam in China. When it is completed, it will be producing north of 18K megawatts of electricity, which is at least three times the potential of Grand Coulee. That's total. California alone has peak consumption exceeding 30K megawatts - another way to look at it is 1K megawatts for every 750K people - (on average for Californians alone). So, as you can see, Grand Coulee couldn't come close to satisfying the electric consumption for most of the west coast, even if it was built out to it's potential.

You'd have to see Three Gorges to believe it, but it really is at least three times the size of Grand Coulee. And, the Chinese are getting ever kilowatt of potential that they can get out of it, as they don't have any rabid environmental concerns to satisfy.

For instance, my husband recently took a tour of the Grand Coulee dam in WA state, where the docent told him that the dam was capable of providing electricity for most of the West coast, but the power goes unused.

I would say the "docent" didn't know what the hell they were talking about.

Grand Coolie has an installed capacity of 6800 MW (about the same as six nuke plants or large coal-fired plants) and last year generated about 20 billion kWh. The State of Washington alone consumes about 100 billion kWh per year.

The answerer is no -- Grand Coolie can not supply the entire West Coast or even the State of Washington by itself.

Also keep in mind that hydro plants generally can not run as baseload units (i.e. full power 24/7) because they would drain their reseviours if they just allowed the water to run all the time. They are limited on the number of hours they can run based upon how much water the damn is holding which is based on how much rain or snow in the watershed.

the dam was capable of providing electricity for most of the West coast, but the power goes unused. She said that Puget Power buys the power from just one turbine, but there is much more available.

The environmentalist were much more concerned about the unsightly wires to bring the power to them, than having any concept of the price that they would pay going without that access.