ELECTRIC DAM Gordons Bay Steenbras No public tours or interest in this historic site

Steenbras Dam is in the Western Cape, just outside Cape Town near Gordon's Bay, The Lower Dam (the original "Steenbras Dam") This is where it all started. Back in 1916, a Board of Engineers was appointed to figure out how to get more water to Cape Town, and the answer they landed on was damming the Steenbras River up in the Hottentots-Holland mountains, right above where you're standing in Gordon's Bay. Work began in 1918 and the dam was completed by 1921, becoming the first major dam built by the city since the small ones up on Table Mountain. Water travelled from here via tunnel and a long pipeline all the way to the Molteno Reservoir near the city centre — a serious feat of engineering for the time. It worked well enough that it supplied most of greater Cape Town's water needs right up until the 1950s. As the city grew, the dam wall itself was raised and an extra pipeline added, finished in 1928, just to keep pace with demand. Today it's known as the Lower Dam, and while it's no longer the city's main water source, it's still part of the broader network and even celebrated its **centenary in 2021**. *The Upper Dam* Fast forward to the 1970s. The Upper Dam was built in 1977, sitting higher up the mountain at around 375 metres, well above the original dam. It's an earth-fill dam rather than concrete, and crucially, it wasn't built primarily for drinking water — it was built for electricity.    • TRANQUILITY BAY      • Saint James : Muizenberg from Shark Shack   *The Power Station* This is the clever part. The Steenbras Power Station, tucked between the Upper Dam and a small lower reservoir close to Gordon's Bay, is a *pumped-storage hydroelectric scheme* — essentially a giant rechargeable battery built into the mountain. Commissioned in 1979, it was the first hydroelectric pumped-storage scheme on the African continent. Here's how it works: during off-peak hours, typically from 11pm to 7am, electricity from the national grid is used to pump water up from the lower reservoir to the Upper Dam. Then, during peak hours, that same water is released back down through four 45 MW turbines — reversible Francis turbines, originally supplied by the Swiss firm Escher Wyss — generating power for the grid, for a combined capacity of 180 MW. It's effectively storing energy as water, and it became a quiet hero of Cape Town's more recent power troubles: it's been used to ease pressure during load-shedding periods caused by South Africa's broader energy crisis. So next time you look up at that mountain from the harbour, you're looking at roughly a century of engineering layered on top of itself: a 1920s water dam at the base, a 1970s "battery mountain" above it, and the same river doing two completely different jobs nearly 60 years apart.    • What a catch! TUNA      • GORDON'S BAY - THE FORBIDDEN WALL      • GORDONS BAY'S FORBIDDEN VIEW      • View The Famous Crayfish Factory