From the Denver Post Four Corners Bureau

Oct. 18 - AMES - If electricity were religion, the Ames Power Plant would be hallowed ground.

It was here, in 1891, from a wooden shack in a short-lived mining camp down the hill from tiny Ophir in southwestern Colorado, that the modern electrical current was first generated and transmitted for commercial use.

It also was here that the vision of Nikola Tesla, a young engineer from Croatia, prevailed over that of his more famous rival, Thomas Edison.

The "Battle of the Currents'' that raged in the late 19th century between the two wizards of their day - Edison advocating direct-current electricity, or DC, and Tesla alternating current, or AC - was settled here. As it turns out, Tesla held the wand that would electrify the nation and the world.

"Ames changed industry. It changed the world. If Edison had won the argument, things would have been very different,'' said Alfred Hughes, a regional supervisor for Public Service Co. of Colorado, which now operates the hydropower plant. With several upgrades over the years, Ames is still making juice more than a hundred years after making history.

Edison, a prodigious inventor whose credits include the electric lightbulb, would hold in his lifetime more patents than anyone, including many potentially valuable patents related to the generation of direct-current electricity. He envisioned a DC-powered world.

But Tesla, who at one time had worked for Edison, was developing another type of current that he believed was superior. He had invented alternating-current generators and inductive motors in Germany in the late 1800s. George Westinghouse, head of the Westinghouse Electric Co. in Pittsburgh, purchased Tesla's patents for that technology.

DC electricity flows in one direction at a constant, unchangeable voltage, and it does not travel efficiently over long distances. AC reverses direction at regular intervals, and it can be stepped up or stepped down by transformers for varying voltages. It can move long distances over thin silver or copper wire.

In the eastern United States, debate raged over whether the massive Niagara Falls would generate Edison's direct electric current or Tesla's alternating current, says Charles Wright of Lakewood, the 81-year-old chairman of the Georgetown Energy Museum. Edison sat on the commission charged with deciding Niagara's destiny, and he steadfastly insisted on DC power. "Edison was quite stubborn,'' Wright says.

The only application for which Edison agreed to use AC was the state of New York's first electric chair.

"Edison labeled AC as the 'death current,' '' Wright says. While Edison's minions put on public demonstrations of AC's danger by electrocuting sheep, Tesla put on exhibitions in Colorado Springs and other places showing how safe it was, Hughes says. Tesla allowed alternating current to pass through his body at low voltages. He was carefully grounded when he took lightning into his own hands.

In the late 1880s, Lucien L. Nunn entered the picture, securing Ames' and Colorado's place in the history of electricity and bringing salvation to Telluride's mining industry.

Colorado's mining boom had been a lure for Nunn, an Ohio farmboy turned adventurer, who had been in and out colleges and law schools, including Harvard, in the United States and Europe. Nunn first tried his hand at running restaurants in Leadville and Durango before landing in Telluride at age 30.

"He was a little fellow, hardly 5 feet tall, but he was quite a manager and developer,'' Wright says. Nunn built mining cabins, practiced law and, by 1888, bought control of the San Miguel County Bank, which was robbed by Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid the next year.

Still, Nunn saw that the biggest long-term threat to his bank and its borrowers, the mining companies, was the high cost of power for driving mine machinery, historian David Lavender wrote in "The Telluride Story.''

Nunn persuaded the principal stockholders of the Gold King Mine and mill that there was an alternative to expensive coal-generated steam power and impending foreclosure. A few miles away from the mine, he knew, the Howard and Lake tributaries of the San Miguel's South Fork pounded down cliffs, squandering their energy in a violent assault against rock. He would capture this energy using experimental technology that would let him transmit electricity several miles over the roughest of country by stringing wire.

After being appointed manager of the Gold King, Nunn recruited his brother, Paul, to help him design the workings of the Ames Power Plant. On June 19, 1891, the Nunns unleashed water on a big wheel belted to a generator. The electricity was transmitted 2.6 miles over rugged terrain to power a motor-driven mill at Gold King. Westinghouse had manufactured the 100-horsepower alternator used.

"Edison had kept insisting that Niagara had to be DC, but here was the proof (in Ames) that alternating current could be used,'' Wright says.

Tesla never visited the spot where his genius bore its first industrial fruits, Wright says. But the good people of Ames would pull up outside the plant in their buckboards and watch the workmen. Whenever they took the Ames generator off the system, they would draw an 8-foot arc of naked electricity across the room before finally breaking the connection. It was quite a spectacle. "We do things a little differently now,'' Hughes says.

The Nunn brothers soon founded the Telluride Power Co., and by 1911, their electrical empire had grown to eight generating stations and 600 miles of transmission lines. They later started the Utah Power & Light Co., still in existence.

The Nunns became consultants at the Edward Dean Adams hydro plant on the U.S. side of Niagara Falls, which went on line in 1895, using alternating current. Paul Nunn eventually would become chief engineer at a hydro plant on the Ontario side of Niagara Falls, Wright says. Lucien Nunn organized a school in Telluride to train employees in the new technology of alternating-current electricity. The current installation at Ames is the third set of alternators and generators, replaced a final time in 1906 with General Electric equipment and a new building of cut granite. The system includes a diversion at the Howard's Fork of the San Miguel and the impounded waters of Trout Lake. Lake Hope, a glacial lake above Trout, augments the water supply in winter. The water is piped about 3 miles for its big plunge into Illium Valley.

Public Service Co. acquired the Ames plant in 1992 in bankruptcy proceedings of the Colorado Ute Electric Association. For Hughes and the plant's operator, Ron Jenkins of Montrose, Ames is a gem that sparkles brighter than ever.

"If it's maintained right, it could run for another 100 years,'' Hughes says. "People drop by to see it. We have a lot of company here, and we like to show it off.''

An upgrade last year increased the plant voltage from 69,000 to 115,000. The plant generates an average of 3.75 megawatts, enough to power a town of nearly 4,000.

Hughes, a steward of one of the industry's treasures, remains in awe of Tesla's achievements.

"He envisioned a world where there was free electricity for everybody,'' Hughes says. He was working on wireless transmission of electricity at the time of his death.''