WSP05441

• File Number: 8407.500
• Description: Platte River Basin - River Basin General Publications - Missouri River
• State: CO
• Basin: South Platte
• Water Division: 1
• Date: 6/1/1949
• Author: DOI
• Title: The Interior Department in the Missouri Basin - Progress Report 1949
• Water Supply Pro - Doc Type: Report/Study

o n n:~ 'H~

Some 21 of the major dams and structures \Jere to have po~rer in-
stallations to provide the pumping energy essential to the success of
the irrigation phase of the plan and to allO\I industrial expansion in
the Missouri Basin area.

Public Law 534 of 1944 authorizing the Missouri River Development
recognized the paramount purpose of the Bureau of Reclamation as the
reclamation of arid land in the \Jest through irrigation and proclaimed
irrigation's prior claim to the water flowinG down the channel of the
Missouri River.

.,

The authorizing act recognized power generation as an important
by-product of the irriGation and flood control storage reservoirs
under the Missouri River Basin Project and incorporated some of the
important precepts of existing po"er policy into the law. It recog-
nized the preferred position of cooperatives and public agencies in
the sale of power developed at government-built plants, and it desig-
nated the Secretary of the Interior as the marketing agent for all
the power generated at Corps of Engineers' plants. The Secretary of
the Interior delegated this function to the Commissioner of Reclamation
and the combined program of generation !llld sale ..,i11 make the Bureau
of Reclamation one of the largest single producers and transmission
agents of electrical energy in the world.

'.

In December 1946, there were 18 Bureau of' Reclamation-operated
power plants in the entire \lest, aggregating 2,098,587 kilo\latts of
nameplate capacity, including plants operated under lease or contract.
In addition the Bureau marketed power from the Fort Peck plant in
Montana, built by the Corps of Engineers with an initial capacity of
35,000 kilowatts (now 50,000 and scheduled to go to 85,000 by 1952).
Particularly due to the ability of some generating machinery to carry
continuous loads in excess of the nameplate rating, the capacity of
all the plants from "hich the Bureau of Reclamation marketed power,
was about 2,205,500 kilowatts which produced about 13,000,000;000 kwh.
At that time, the Bureau of Reclamation operated a total of 2,447 miles
of transmission lines with voltages of 23,000 or hiGher; 1,400 miles
were of 115-kv. or hiGher.

When taken alone, the electric energy marketed by the Bureau of
Reclamation in 1946 seems impressive, but when we realize that total
produotion of electric energy in the United States in 1946 was slightly
more than 220 billions of kilowatt hours, we realize that the output
of the Federal plants represented a very small drop in the nation-wide
bucket, about 5.9 percent.

In the Missouri River Basin, lluring 1946 the Bureau of Reclamation
produced some 476,000,000 kilowatt-hours of po~ror as compared with
13,507,000,000 kilowatt-hours, which represented the total used in
the Basin during 1946, or about 3.5 percent of the electric energy
used in the Missouri Baain.

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