TVA’s pumped-storage generating plant is located inside Raccoon Mountain.  The four turbine-pumps are called Allis-Chalmers hybrids.  They occupy a dugout section of the mountain's limestone the size of a football field.   Raccoon Mountain is located six miles west of Chattanooga along the eastern fringe of the rocky Cumberland Plateau.   It is covered with a pine forest.

(Courtesy of  TVA)

TEACHER ACTIVITIES:

• Teachers will be given a guided tour of the facility and will learn the following interesting facts about this marvelous engineering feat.

• Hydropower is the U.S.’s most reliable, efficient, and economical renewable source of power.   What is hydroelectric power?

• On top of Raccoon Mountain is a man-made lake holding about 1,620 million cubic feet of water.  Below the lake, hundreds of feet down inside Raccoon Mountain, is TVA's pumped storage plant with lighted tunnels, elevators, and  pieces of heavy machinery. It is an engineering marvel.  The ever increasing demand for electricity induced TVA to find a way to produce power and store it so that it can be available when demand rose.  One way of doing this was to pump additional water into the reservoir behind a dam and hold its potential energy there until it was needed.  It was constructed in the '70's.  A small lake was hollowed out on the mountaintop and sealed by a huge 8,500-foot-long dam. In the subterranean pumphouse, four great turbines generated electricity from the flowing water. When demand for power was low, the pumping would be reversed and  the water was pumped back up to the top of the mountain at seven million gallons per minute.

• With over 1,000 workers at Raccoon Mountain during the building of the pump station, 270 million cubic ft. of earth was removed to build the lake.  Twelve thousand feet of subterranean tunnels were carved. And a football field-size space was carved out of solid limestone to house the four huge Allis-Chalmers pump turbines. Over 270 million cubic ft. of fill was used to construct the mountaintop dam.   It is the largest rock-fill dam ever built by TVA and it cost 300 million dollars.  The Raccoon Mountain Pumped Storage Plant generates 14 times more power than nearby Chickamauga Dam with 1.6 million kilowatts of capacity.  It is a major factor in the operation of the entire TVA power system.

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