Brazil: September 2023: Day 5: Itaipu Dam

Brazil

September 2023: Day 5: Itaipu Dam

Grabbing a snack at the Itaipu Dam visitor center. It was not bad for what's basically gas station level food.

Rock fill portion of the dam.

Lots of heavy equipment..

Looking down from the top.

Looking down, part 2: straight down.

Massive water feed pipes and electrical distribution.

Not sure what the white towers are. Vents?

Itaipu reservoir, created by the dam blocking the Parana River.

Many power lines. 600kV I think they said.

Descending from the top of the dam to the main service road, with power lines right over your head. Scale.

Scale.

Different sense of scale. Selfie.

Selfie.

Inside one of the "cathedrals".

Looking down from 108 meters in height...

Down to I think 44 meters? (or is it 60 meters?)

Reverse angle inside one of the buttresses.

V-shaped buttress, facing the reservoir.

Love the angles of the buttresses.

One more shot. Wish I had taken this as an HDR.

Now inside the damn a few dozen meters over from the open area. That's a long way down.

Diagram of one of the generator units. Later we'll see the exposed upper shaft, which at 1.65 meters is way smaller than the 3.7 meter turbine shaft...

Control room. Exactly down the middle is the border between Paraguay and Brazil.

Is it transformers underneath the red covers?

Outside again.

Appreciating just how big things are.

Step-up transformer from 18kV to 500kV, ~200 tons and ~800MVA.

Elevators in power stations are marked in meters, not floors.

Upper shaft is "small" relatively speaking.

View from the observation area.

Big tall building at left is roughly where we were.

Spillway is massive.

One more photo of the spillway and the rest of the dam.

Sunny day at Iguazu Falls, looking at the San Martin segment right across from the hotel.

They claim the hotel has only one floor. They're full of s***.

Guara, aka scarlet ibis, at Parque das Aves.

Bare-faced curassow.

Wood stork.

King vulture.

No clue what kind of bird this is. Golden-capped parakeet maybe? Toucan.

Toucan.

Striped owl.

Blue-and-yellow macaw.

Siproeta stelenes.

Iguazu Falls from the building/viewing area/elevators on the Brazilian side.

One last sunset at Iguazu Falls.

Milking the last seconds of sunset for all they are worth.

Last vestiges of sunset on the horizon as viewed from the hotel.

Itaipu Dam was an unexpectedly fascinating morning. Had no idea it was (as of this visit) the third largest hydroelectric powerplant in the world, and due to the design/available water, Itaipu Binacional is actually one of the very top producers of electricity annually. The longer tour (aka the "special" tour) actually gets you inside the dam to see the v-shaped open buttresses, atop the rock fill sections, and deeper down inside the dam to see the tops of the turbine shafts and some of the structures covering the transformers. They obviously do not let you get too close to a 500kV step-up transformer for safety reasons! And seeing the collaboration with Paraguay, and crossing briefly between the two countries to see the full scale of the project-- maybe not worth the time for everyone, but if you appreciate engineering at all...

Having seen Hoover Dam before, well, let's just Hoover Dam is a baby compared to Itaipu-- Itaipu is number three in installed capacity in the world at 14,000 megawatts, while Hoover Dam doesn't even crack the list at a mere ~2,000 MW.

Being stuck at the hotel also meant this outing was one of my only times actually seeing Foz do Iguacu-- looked like a nice enough little city. Kind of wished I at least had time to stop by for lunch.

Took the hotel shuttle to Parque das Aves after the Itaipu Dam tour. Birds, especially captive ones, are not normally my thing, but they do a good job here, with very, very large enclosures and an extensive selection of birds rescued from illegal bird traffickers. They have a butterfly exhibit as well which was nice for variety.

Headed back to the hotel just in time for sunset. Clear skies and high water levels meant not the greatest photos, but the view from the top level of the viewing platforms over the Devil's Throat are clearly the way to go. Looking back at the rest of photos, being ten or possibly even twenty minutes early before sunset might actually be the best angle of the sun on the falls as opposed to closer to sunset; a trade-off between the rays of light from the sun itself vs. the sunstar you get as the sun fals below the horizon.