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WATER POWER.
Water power has never been an important source of industrial power
in Texas because of the irregular and frequently insufficient
flow of Texas rivers. As early as 1822, however, James Bryan contemplated
building a gristmill on the Colorado River, and a few years later
Jared E. Groceqv was granted land over and above his headright for constructing
a gristmill and sawmill on the Brazos. About 1825 George Huff
and others obtained land from the Mexican government to locate
a saw and grist mill on the San Bernard, but the contract was
voided in May 1825. A few mills using water power were probably
built, although most of the early gristmills, sawmills, and cotton
gins were powered either by steam or by oxen. Various types of
water wheels could have been used to transmit power directly through
shafts and belts to the mill machinery. In 1841 William Kennedyqv reported that he believed the streams of Texas afforded great
facilities for water mills, but by 1882 there were few mills in
the state over twenty-five years old and little utilization of
water power except in localities where there were swift moving
streams with natural falls, such as a woolen manufacturing plant
on the Comal River. Many of the mills had to maintain an auxiliary
steam plant. A natural dam and series of three falls at Marble
Falls resulted in the establishment of a number of flour mills,
cotton gins, gristmills, and a cottonseed oil mill. By 1890 a
new type of turbine wheel had begun to replace older styles of
water wheels, and some electric power was being generated by hydroelectric
plants. Numerous small power plants, such as one on the San Marcos
River near Prairie Lea, were operated by private owners. The Prairie
Lea mill had a dam constructed of a timber framework filled in
with rocks; its turbine wheel could produce forty-five horsepower
under a seven-foot head. The power operated a gin, a corn mill,
and a Wiley dynamo. By 1923 water power in Texas was developing
a total of 12,000 horsepower, utilized for ginning cotton, grinding
corn, sawing lumber, and generating some electricity. Since the
early 1930s the use of water power for direct-connecting machinery
has declined, but numbers of hydroelectric plants have been built
both as private corporations and as federal projects. On November
1, 1946, of the 194 electric power plants in Texas, twenty-six
were hydroelectric generating about 15 percent of the state's
electric power. In January 1967 there were twenty-three hydroelectric
plants with a total generating capacity of 389,860 kilowatts.
In the 1970s major power plant sites included International Falcon
Reservoir,qv six sites on the Highland Lakes of the Colorado River, Amistad
Reservoirqv on the Rio Grande, two sites along the Brazos River, six plants
on the Guadalupe River, Denison Dam on the Red River, and Toledo
Bend Reservoirqv on the Sabine River. In the later part of the twentieth century
the use of hydroelectric power continued to decline as compared
to other means of power generation. In 1992, of the 390 generating
units in Texas and thirty units outside Texas supplying power
to the state, only 1 percent were hydroelectric. In 1994 there
were twenty-three hydroelectric power plants in Texas, or, more
specifically, twenty-three dams with power facilities. The facilities
contained a total of forty-four generating units with a total
generating capacity of 541.7 megawatts.
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