Through Road Trip, Competitive Energy Services features various energy infrastructure projects – road trip style. We have always enjoyed visiting and learning about the physical energy infrastructure that powers our world. Our families and friends are often subject to detours on family vacations – as was the case with this month’s feature.

While on vacation over Thanksgiving weekend, CES' Will Dickerman, Energy Analyst, and his family visited and toured the Hoover Dam, operated by the United States Bureau of Reclamation. The hydroelectric arch-gravity dam straddles the Colorado River in the Black Canyon of the Colorado, between the Nevada and Arizona border. Constructed between 1931 and 1935, the Hoover Dam stands 726 feet tall, the approximate height of a sixty-story building. The dam contains enough concrete to build a four-foot-wide sidewalk around the equator. It weighs as much as 18 Empire State Buildings. Seventeen main turbines provide a nameplate generating capacity of 2,080 megawatts (MW).

Before Hoover Dam was constructed, the flow of the Colorado River was unpredictable, with frequent periods of drought and devasting floods that would wreak havoc on the flatter topography downstream. Constructing a dam here meant diverting the flow of the Colorado by constructing four 56-foot diameter diversion tunnels. Because the concrete would take more than 125 years to cool and set on its own, engineers devised a system where construction crews would pour blocks and cool the concrete using chilled water from a refrigeration plant. After four years of around-the-clock work, President Franklin Roosevelt dedicated Hoover Dam in 1935.

“As an energy professional and college history major, visiting the Hoover Dam combined two passions. Seeing the colossal scale of the dam, penstocks, and spillways left me in awe. Learning about the dam’s history gave me a greater appreciation for the Hoover Dam as a 1930s engineering marvel and the role of water in shaping the modern American West.”

Photo by: Will Dickerman 

Competitive Energy Services was a proud sponsor of the YMCA Alliance of Northern New England’s Northern New England Leadership Conference, the premier conference for YMCA staff and volunteers in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont that encourages learning, collaboration, and networking across chapters. More than 250 YMCA leaders attended from across the region to participate in workshops and to celebrate the Y’s work building healthier communities. Lauren Grey, Senior Energy Services Advisor, and Daniel Long, Client Development Coordinator joined in on the fun while representing CES and networking with attendees at the company’s conference booth this year. 

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