Power Plants Use Big Machinery to Power Cities and Homes

The Size of Power Plant Equipment Can Be Staggering

Power Plants are massive buildings, and likewise, they utilize massive equipment. The sheer size of some components can blow your mind.

How Power Plants Make Electricity

Though power plants use varying methods to generate electricity, they all follow the same principles. Through some means they turn a turbine, which is attached to an electrical generator. In fossil fuel and nuclear power plants, water is heated to create steam, and the steam turns the turbine which operates the generator. In wind and hydroelectric plants, wind and water respectively turn the turbines which generate the electricity.

The Pieces that Make it Work

Steam Turbines

As mentioned above, steam turbines are what operates the generator in fossil fuel plants and nuclear plants. These steam turbines can weigh over 200 tons and their length can be over 100 feet long. To put this in perspective, an average elephant weighs 5 tons. The mass of these turbines is so great that even when they're not in use they must be kept rotating in order to keep them from getting bent.

Cooling Towers

Another massive piece of power plants are cooling towers. Cooling towers are most often associated with nuclear power plants, but they are a part of any power plants that uses steam to turn a turbine. This is because cooling towers are the part of the plant designed to deal with the waste heat from the plant. Cooling towers can be over 500 feet tall, and over 250 feet in diameter. Fixtures of this amount of size aren't always practical though. Because of this, some power plants near to a natural body of water use the body of water to cool the waste heat. The drawback to this is that this process raises the temperature of the body of water and can disrupt the ecosystem around the body of water.

These Big Pieces are Only a Small Part of the Picture

These massive objects are only a couple parts of what make power plants work. Fossil fuel plants have a furnace which is where the fuel is burned to create heat. These plants also have boilers where the heat is transferred to water to create steam to turn the turbines. Other plants also have special mechanisms to deal with problems specifically related to their unique methods of power generation. Regardless of the type of plant, however, you can count on the size of the machinery.