How does a dam make electricity from water?
Water's Power Trip
How does a dam make electricity from water?
You flip a switch and the lights come on. You plug in your phone and it charges. Where does all that electricity come from? Some of it tumbles down from a mountain, trapped inside rushing water, just waiting to spin.
A dam is a giant wall built across a river. Water piles up behind it, deep and heavy, like a bathtub that never drains. The river wants to keep flowing downhill — gravity pulls on every drop — but the dam says "wait." All that waiting water is storing energy, the way a boulder at the top of a hill is just waiting to roll.
