Cohoes Falls: Hydroelectricity Gone Wrong or Right?
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Considered by early travelers the second most beautiful falls after Niagara. Check out the live webcam of the Cohoes Falls.
Cohoes Falls is located on the Mohawk River near the towns of Cohoes and Waterford in upstate New York. The falls are 75 feet high and over 1,000 feet long.
Image via Wikipedia
For daily live looks at the Cohoes Falls click Here. This webcam is updated 3 times daily and explained in more detail below.
For centuries visitors have admired Cohoes Falls and they are mentioned in many letters and journals dating back to the 1600’s. James Fenimore Cooper mentioned the falls in his novels. Also known as the Great Falls of the Mohawk, in 1804 Thomas Moore, the national poet of Ireland, visited the falls and wrote a paean about their beauty, “Lines Written at the Cohos (sic), or Falls of the Mohawk River.”
Travelers considered the Cohoes Falls the second most beautiful falls after Niagara. But that all changed in 1831.
In 1831, the city of Cohoes built a dam across the Mohawk River to provide energy for the city’s burgeoning textile industry. By the mid 1800’s, the areas top textile company, Harmony Mills, became the leading manufacturer of cotton in the United States thanks to its control of local water rights. So most of the water flow from the river did not reach Cohoes Falls, as it was diverted for energy uses. Some of the water flow was also used for the Erie Canal beginning in 1825.
Image via Wikipedia
When the Great Depression occurred all the mills went out of business but instead of trying to develop Cohoes Falls for tourism, the city’s leaders leased the water rights to power companies like Niagara Mohawk. So except for heavy rain periods Cohes Falls has often seen reduced or no water flow which reveals the shale rock formations of the river bed.
Image via Wikipedia
In 2007, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, an independent federal agency that regulates the interstate transmission of natural gas, oil, electricity and hydropower projects, granted Erie Boulevard Hydropower L.P., a Brookfield Renewable Power Inc. subsidiary, a new 40-year license to continue operating its 38.8-megawatt School Street hydropower station on the Mohawk River near Cohoes Falls. Brookfield Renewable Power is one of the lowest-cost producers of hydroelectric power in North America.
As part of the license agreement, Brookfield Renewable Power built a four-acre Falls View Park adjacent to the School Street hydroelectric generating facility. The park offers visitors a much closer view of Cohoes Falls than was previously available from an older overlook farther downstream.
You can read more about it here. In addition to the new park, Brookfield Renewable Power in cooperation with the U.S. Geological Survey posts daily pictures of Cohoes Falls from a webcam at the USGS gaging station in the area, click here to see.
For nearly two centuries now the water flow over Cohoes Falls has been diverted and used for energy. The diverted water flow provided a cheap source of energy that fueled the creation of many jobs in the area but often at the expense of the natural beauty of the Cohoes Falls.
Image via Wikipedia (Marmore Falls)
The largest man-made waterfalls in the world built by the Romans in 271 BC, Marmore Falls, also sees its water flows diverted for hydroelectric power but to accommodate tourists visiting Marmore Falls today, water is allowed to flow over the falls at full force at set times each day. Whether this would ever work at Cohoes Falls is debatable.
See Barron Falls, Australia for another beautiful waterfall affected by Hydroelectricity and see Rhine Falls where conservationists in Switzerland have successfully fought off water diversion for energy uses for hundreds of years.
12 Comments
good article, very interesting.
Very well researched article with great pictures. And it made me go and find out more about Thomas Moore because despite being Irish I had never heard of him before!
you always comes out with very interesting articles and informative too. thanks for sharing.
Another interesting and informative article with stunning photos as usual.
Great work!..That was very interesting and well-written article..I really enjoyed reading yr work..Nice pics too..Well done and thnx for sharing this great stuff
Another gorgeous waterfall article! Sweeeeet.
My Best to you,
Momma Tells
Wonderfully done article. I dont know, it is a hard call with the pros and cons of hydroelcricity.
It is such a shame that our beautiful rivers are sabotaged and ruined. We should never let these things happen.But it’s happening all over to provide cheap electricty and it’s not so cheap after all. If we all used half as much electricty there would be no need for these plants and our planet would survive longer.
Shame there isn’t a better answer. Water power has been used for centuries…maybe this is a good place for some research into creating a better way.
Great article, and food for thought. It’s a tough call with hydro-electric power. I guess one question would be what the impact of the equivalent energy production using, say, a coal-fired power station would have been? Is it better to diminish the beauty of one river if it saves the atmosphere from the damage caused by other less ‘clean’ energy sources?
Great article. There is currently some major construction going on at the hydro plant and the feeder canal. The canal is drained. It would be very helpful if the “powers that be” posted some information on several relavent web sites, so the public knows what’s going on. Maybe it’s there – where is it?
Actually, some of the information in the article is not correct. The 1831 dam was not built by the city of Cohoes (Cohoes did not become a city until 1869) but by the Cohoes Company, which built the dam and sold power to many industries in Cohoes, including the Harmony Mills.
But considering the present and the future, we hope that the possibility of re-review of the license for the School St. facility may provide the opportunity to consider alternate proposals for the site that would provide both more water over the falls and more effective hydropower generation.