private and commercial customers was opened in Wisconsin, USA, and within a decade,
hundreds of hydropower plants were in operation.In North America, hydropower plants were
installed at Grand Rapids, Michigan (1880), Ottawa, Ontario (1881), Dolgeville, New York
(1881), and Niagara Falls, New York (1881). They were used to supply mills and light some
local buildings.
By the turn of the 20
th
century the technology was spreading round the globe, with Germany
producing the first three-phase hydro-electric system in 1891, and Australia launching the first
publicly owned plant in the Southern Hemisphere in 1895.In 1895, the world’s largest
hydroelectric development of the time, the Edward Dean Adams Power Plant, was created at
Niagara Falls.
In 1905, a hydroelectric station was built on the Xindian creek near Taipei, with an installed
capacity of 500 kW. This was quickly followed by the first station in mainland China, the
Shilongba plan in the Yunnan province, which was built in 1910 and put into operation in 1912.
Upon completion Shilongba had an installed capacity of 480 kW – today it is still in operation
with an installed capacity of 6 MW. In the first half of the 20
th
century, the USA and Canada led
the way in hydropower engineering. At 1,345 MW, the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River
became the world’s largest hydro-electric plant in 1936, surpassed by the Grand Coulee Dam
(1,974 MW at the time, 6,809 MW today) in Washington in 1942.
From the 1960s through to the 1980s, large hydropower developments were carried out in
Canada, the USSR, and Latin America.
Over the last few decades, Brazil and China have become world leaders in hydropower. The
Itaipu Dam, straddling Brazil and Paraguay, opened in 1984 at 12,600 MW (it has since been
enlarged and uprated to 14,000 MW), and is today only eclipsed in size by the 22,500 MW China
Three Gorges Dam, which opened in 2008.
Hydropower today
Into the 21
st
century, hydropower continues to catalyse growth around the world. For example, it
has played a key role in transforming Brazil into the seventh largest country by GDP in 2012; not
least through a period of very rapid economic growth between 2000 and 2010, which saw its