Raccoon Mountain Pumped-Storage Plant
lake in the United States of America
Raccoon Mountain Pumped-Storage Plant is a pumped-storage hydroelectric underground power station in Marion County, just west of Chattanooga in the U.S. state of Tennessee. Owned and operated by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), the plant can generate a maximum of 1,652 megawatts of electricity. The reservoir at the top of the mountain covers 528 acres (214 ha), with a dam that is 230 feet (70 m) high and 5,800 feet (1,800 m) long, the largest rock-fill dam ever built by TVA. With a hydraulic head of roughly 1000 feet high, the dam can apply a maximum force of approximately 450 pounds per square inch of water pressure to the Turbine. The plant serves as an important element for peak power generation and grid balancing in the TVA system.
Construction was started in 1970 and was completed in 1978. The plant was idled in March 2012 due to cracks in the generators' rotors. The plant came entirely back on line in April 2014.
Operation
During periods of high electric demand, water flows from reservoir into a tunnel drilled through the center of the mountain, driving electric generators in the underground powerhouse. During periods of low demand and excess generation, the generators run in reverse and pump water from Nickajack Lake back up to the top of the mountain, where it is stored until needed later. This process repeats continuously, serving as peak power generation.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Raccoon Mountain Pumped-Storage Plant” as lake in the United States of America. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the places & architecture register because the source frames it as lake in the United States of America. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Place names and jurisdictional language are key evidence: both can reveal earlier catalogue descriptions and overlooked record series. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2125134. Authority coordinates are 35.048, -85.397. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1000, 1970, 1978 and 2012.
Architectural summaries often privilege surviving fabric and can understate demolished phases, contested use or displaced communities. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Raccoon Mountain Pumped-Storage Plant” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.