120 Years of the Parnahyba Hydropower Plant: The View

 Electricity had a fundamental role in these transformations.   On September 23rd, 1901, the Parnahyba Hydropower Plant was inaugurated, being the first large scale plant constructed in Brazil, by The San Paulo Tramway Light and Power Company.

Initially, the power generated in the Plant was allotted to the charging of both the electric tram system and the capital city’s public lighting, which led to the Plant eventually becoming one of the main contributors to the industrial leap undergone by the city of São Paulo throughout the first twenty years of the 20th century.

Celebrating the 120th Anniversary of the former Parnahyba Hydropower Plant, now the Edgar de Souza Dam, the Foundation of Energy and Sanitation presents images and curiosity bits of this piece of history, through ample documentation of the Plant’s construction process in the exposition “120 years of the Parnahyba Hydropower Plant”.  

The Parnahyba Hydropower Plant is the byproduct of human interaction with the environment, as a result of the growing usage of new technologies and techniques developed since the later decades of the 19th century.

for the installation of the Plant was the Cachoeira do Inferno (Hell’s Waterfall), a natural waterfall in the Tietê River, in the city of Santana de Parnaíba. 

The Tietê is the largest river in the State of São Paulo, with its source being in the county of Salesópolis, a few kilometers from the Atlantic Ocean, flowing inwardly from the coast, and draining in the Paraná River, at the state border between São Paulo and Mato Grosso do Sul.

currents was the main source of the Plant’s power generation.

was chosen due to its proximity to the city of São Paulo. The initial calculations indicated that, after the damming, the creation of a 25-meter water drop would provide the total potency of 20.000 horses, which guaranteed an outstanding prospect for the generation of hydroelectricity. 

By the blueprint from 1952, we can visualize the distance between the Parnahyba Hydropower Plant construction site and the city of São Paulo. In 1900, with no roads built, the commutation, now considered short, was extremely challenging to the entire crew involved.

Situated 30 kilometers away from the capital, the Parnahyba Hydropower Plant was constructed in the city of Santana do Parnaíba.

The American engineer Hugh L. Cooper was the one appointed to choose the Plant’s construction site. He had previously been responsible for the construction of the Keokuk Dam, in the Mississippi river, in the United States of America, and of the Dnieper Plants, in Russia.

Due to its inaccessibility,  the Light company needed to create a road network that connected the 30 kilometers in-between the two cities. Furthermore, the company also counted on the railroad network to transport the imported materials shipped in through the Porto de Santos (Santos Seaport). 

Even though it led to the generation of the electrical energy that powered São Paulo in the first few decades of the 20th century, the construction of the Parnahyba Hydropower Plant ended up transforming the habitual flooding seasons of the Tietê River in inundations well beyond the river’s floodplains.