With other 1,200 miles of rights-of-way (ROW) located beneath its high voltage transmission lines in Northeast Oklahoma, the Grand River Dam Authority literally has a lot of ground to cover. After all, all those miles of ROW have to be mowed, cleared and maintained on a regular basis to make sure that no power outages [...]
Like all rivers, the river that would one day be known as the “Grand” in Northeast Oklahoma has benefited civilization for centuries. Long before anyone ever thought of making a lake from its waters or harnessing those waters to create electricity, the Grand was supplying a necessary resource for those along its shores. It is [...]
The Grand River Dam Authority was created in 1935 to be a conservation and reclamation district for Grand River’s waters and a resource that could provide low-cost, reliable electric power for its Oklahoma neighbors. GRDA has been meeting these goals since the completion of the Pensacola Dam in 1940. As a non-appropriated agency, GRDA relies [...]
Power for Progress… A weekly column from the Grand River Dam Authority Once Upon A Time at GRDA: Memories of an early-day lineman “July’s heat lay like a sodden horse blanket over the Grand River valley below the Fort Gibson dam, where two GRDA crews were engaged in relocating a power line to make [...]
One of the strengths of the Grand River Dam Authority’s overall electric utility functions is generation diversity. With the ability to generate electricity with hydro power, coal and natural gas, GRDA has different options to insure greater reliability and delivery of abundant, low-cost electricity to customers across Oklahoma. Of course, it all started with hydro [...]
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Raised on a farm in White Oak, Oklahoma, Lana Daugherty has been a public power customer nearly all of her life. In fact, she learned how to drive a tractor before she could drive a car, and even that helped her to understand firsthand the importance of rural electricity. She expressed that understanding in words [...]
As I mentioned in last week’s column, a group of Grand Lakers, made up of Joe Harwood, Mike Williams, Casey Davis and yours truly, traveled to our nation’s capital on Monday for a meeting to petition our elected representatives for some form of relief from the intrusive Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). The process to [...]
It’s now been approximately six years since the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s recommendation, that Grand Lake develope a Shoreline Management Plan, was changed from that of a recommendation during the relicensing process in the early nineties to an outright federal mandate. The options available were simple; develop one of your own, complete with stakeholder input, [...]
The adage that “you can innovate all you want as long as you don’t change anything” fits perfectly in relation to a creative idea promoted by W.R. Holway, consulting engineer for the hydroelectric projects on the Grand River. There is little doubt that construction of the Pensacola and Kerr Dams were the [...]
