The Bridal Veil Power Plant: Alternating Current at the End of the Road
Near Telluride, Colorado
Above Telluride, at the top of a box canyon, Bridal Veil Falls drops three hundred sixty-five feet in a single free-fall that is the tallest waterfall in Colorado. At the base of the falls, built into the cliff face in nineteen oh seven, there is a small brick powerhouse that has been generating alternating current electricity ever since.
The original plant was built in eighteen ninety-one, when the Pandora Mill below the falls needed power and no utility served this canyon. It was rebuilt after a fire and has operated more or less continuously since nineteen oh seven. It has survived avalanches that have buried the canyon floor multiple times. It has survived the collapse of the mining economy that justified its existence. It has survived a century of mountain weather at an elevation that would discourage most construction.
Whether it is the oldest alternating current power plant in continuous operation in the world is a claim the National Register of Historic Places documentation supports, and one that other institutions and competing plants have contested. The honest framing is that it is among the oldest alternating current installations still generating power anywhere in the world, by most accounts.
The technology running in that brick building is Nikola Tesla's: alternating current, polyphase, the system Tesla demonstrated against Thomas Edison's direct current in the eighteen nineties. It came to one of the most remote industrial settings in North America before it came to most American cities. The falls are still falling. The plant is still running.
