Pelton Wheel - Satellite Oddity - Llanberis, Wales.
N 53° 07.108 W 004° 07.302
30U E 424929 N 5886036
The Pelton Wheel is a water jet turbine invented in 1870, & used to drive electrical generators in the early 1900's. This old Pelton wheel is featured on Virtual Globetrotting & on display at the Electric Mountain, visitor center, Llanberis, Wales.
Waymark Code: WMP4X5
Location: North Wales, United Kingdom
Date Posted: 07/01/2015
Views: 4
The Pelton Wheel is on display outside the Visitor Centre for the Dinorwig pumped storage power station, called the Electric Mountain.
This turbine was in use until 1988 in Cwm Dyli Hydro power station supplying power to the slate quarries, one of 4 generating a total of 6 MW.
Dinorwig - Electric Mountain can generate a peak power of 1782 MW from its 6 turbine pump units, enough to power the whole of Wales.
"The Pelton wheel is an impulse type water turbine. It was invented by Lester Allan Pelton in the 1870s. The Pelton wheel extracts energy from the impulse of moving water, as opposed to water's dead weight like the traditional overshot water wheel. Many variations of impulse turbines existed prior to Pelton's design, but they were less efficient than Pelton's design. Water leaving those wheels typically still had high speed, carrying away much of the dynamic energy brought to the wheels. Pelton's paddle geometry was designed so that when the rim ran at half the speed of the water jet, the water left the wheel with very little speed; thus his design extracted almost all of the water's impulse energy—which allowed for a very efficient turbine." Text Source: (
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Electric Mountain Web Site: (
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