The Most Remarkable Hydroelectric Power Stations in the World
7 places in 5 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most remarkable hydroelectric power stations in the world are Vemork (Norway), Toronto Power Generating Station (Canada) and Olidan Hydroelectric Power Station (Sweden). The list covers 7 hydroelectric power stations in 5 countries. Canada has the most, with 2. Last updated 13 October 2026.
In the early decades of electricity, a power station was a public promise, and the companies that harnessed falling water often built for it like a palace. The remarkable hydroelectric stations are the ones from that confident age and the landscapes they belong to: turbine halls with arched windows and stone facades, set at the foot of a gorge or on the brink of a great waterfall.
Our list gathers several of them. The Toronto Power Generating Station at Niagara Falls is a Beaux-Arts hall of grey stone that looks more like a museum than a plant, and nearby the Niagara Parks Power Station keeps its generator hall and a tailrace tunnel running out beneath the falls. Vemork in Norway, perched above a deep valley near Rjukan, was once among the largest power stations in the world and is remembered for the wartime sabotage of its heavy water plant. In Lombardy, the Taccani station at Trezzo sull'Adda sits beneath the ruins of a Visconti castle, and in the Eifel, Heimbach is a turbine hall in Jugendstil dress.
The places here were chosen for how they look and ordered by beauty. Each has its own text, a photograph credited to its author and a point on the map, and the collection also opens country by country on separate pages.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Vemork | Hydroelectric power station | Norway | |
| 2 | Toronto Power Generating Station | Hydroelectric power station | Canada | |
| 3 | Olidan Hydroelectric Power Station | Hydroelectric power station | Sweden | |
| 4 | Heimbach Hydroelectric Power Station | Hydroelectric power station | Germany | |
| 5 | Såheim Power Station | Hydroelectric power station | Norway | |
| 6 | Taccani Hydroelectric Power Station | Hydroelectric power station | Italy | |
| 7 | Niagara Parks Power Station | Hydroelectric power station | Canada |
01 Vemork
Norway59.872° N 8.494° E
Image by Moellenborg from Pixabay Vemork sits on a ledge above a deep gorge outside Rjukan in Telemark, reached across a suspension bridge over the chasm. When it opened in 1911 it was the largest power station in the world, with a capacity of 108 MW, built by the company that became Norsk Hydro to supply electricity for making artificial fertiliser from atmospheric nitrogen, a process developed by the physicist Kristian Birkeland. The construction was so costly that it had to be financed from abroad, and the town of Rjukan grew up almost entirely around the works.
Did you know? The power station was designed by the architect Olaf Nordhagen, who also designed the public library in Bergen.
02 Toronto Power Generating Station
Canada · 3.9 km from Niagara Falls43.072° N 79.074° W
Mike Garrett from Canada · CC BY 2.0 Standing on the bank of the Niagara River just above the falls, the Toronto Power Generating Station looks more like a museum of antiquities or a state bank than a place where water was turned into electricity. That was the point. The Toronto architect E. J. Lennox, who also designed Toronto's Old City Hall and the Casa Loma castle for one of the station's backers, gave the powerhouse a symmetrical Beaux-Arts front 132 metres long: a heavy Ionic portico at the centre, flanked by two long Ionic colonnades, all over a steel frame clad in brick and pale Indiana limestone. The riverside was already a celebrated landscape, and the building was meant to dignify it rather than spoil it.
Did you know? Construction started in 1903 and the plant kept growing for about a decade, with expansions continuing until 1924.
03 Olidan Hydroelectric Power Station
Olidans kraftverk
Sweden · 1.8 km from Trollhättan58.274° N 12.272° E
Tubaist · CC BY-SA 3.0 Olidan is where Sweden learned to turn its rivers into electricity on an industrial scale. Built by the state from 1905–1906 at the great falls of the Göta älv in Trollhättan, the power station began producing in 1910 and was expanded in stages, with further turbines added by 1914 and 1921; it was for years the largest hydroelectric plant in the country. The organisation created to build it, the Royal Waterfall Board, grew into the state energy company Vattenfall, and the whole region around the falls is often described as the cradle of Swedish power generation. The station is still in operation.
Did you know? The station takes its name from Olidan, originally two farms on the land where it was built.
04 Heimbach Hydroelectric Power Station
Kraftwerk Heimbach
Germany50.629° N 6.452° E
Leonhard Lenz · CC0 A power station is rarely the most handsome building in a valley, but the one at Heimbach in the northern Eifel was designed to be exactly that. When it was commissioned in August 1905, its 12 megawatts made it the largest storage hydroelectric plant in Europe, and its owners dressed the achievement accordingly: the architect Georg Frentzen gave it a Jugendstil hall with towers on the hillside flank, a turbine room spanned freely by iron trusses, and a control desk where every meter and switch was made of brass, mounted on marble and framed in mahogany. The station is still running today, operated by RWE, which makes it one of the rare places where Art Nouveau craftsmanship and live electricity generation share the same room.
Did you know? Each of the eight original turbines drove its own generator of 1.5 megawatts, adding up to the station's first 12 megawatts.
05 Såheim Power Station
Norway59.877° N 8.593° E
Jac Brun · Public domain Rjukan is a company town squeezed into the bottom of a narrow valley so deep that the sun does not reach it from roughly September to March, and the building that best explains why the town exists is the Såheim power station. Locals call it "the Opera", and the nickname is fair: this is one of the most monumental industrial buildings in Norway, a long stone-faced block with a tower, columns and round arches borrowed from the architecture of palaces and churches rather than factories. It was designed from 1912 by Thorvald Astrup, who became Norsk Hydro's house architect for decades, together with Olaf Nordhagen, and it housed under a single roof both the turbine hall and the great furnace halls where electricity was turned into fertiliser.
Did you know? The building was planned to house a furnace hall for 40 Birkeland-Eyde arc furnaces of the largest type, alongside a power plant almost as big as Vemork.
06 Taccani Hydroelectric Power Station
Centrale idroelettrica Taccani
Italy · 15.1 km from Bergamo45.613° N 9.521° E
Antonella Cappo · CC BY-SA 4.0 Few power stations were built to look as though they had always belonged to their river. The Taccani hydroelectric plant sits at the foot of the rocky promontory where the Adda makes a sharp bend at Trezzo, directly beneath the ruins of the castle that Bernabò Visconti raised here around 1370. Its architect, Gaetano Moretti, took his cue from that medieval neighbour: the building is faced in ceppo dell'Adda, the coarse, pebbly conglomerate of the river banks, and its vertical rhythm of piers and windows echoes the surviving Visconti tower above it. The result is an eclectic blend of Lombard Romanesque memories and early-twentieth-century modernism, with a central control hall flanked by long wings for the turbines, so well married to the cliff and the water that from the far bank it reads almost as part of the fortress.
Did you know? In 1906 the station had ten hydroelectric generators producing 10,000 kW, backed up by four steam generators with 4,000 kW more.
07 Niagara Parks Power Station
Rankine Generating Station
Canada · 4.1 km from Niagara Falls43.075° N 79.079° W
Antony-22 · CC BY-SA 4.0 Just upstream of the Horseshoe Falls, on the Canadian bank of the Niagara River, stands one of the most beautiful industrial buildings in North America: a long Beaux-Arts power house that looks more like a grand public building than a machine. It was built for the Canadian Niagara Power Company and opened in January 1905 with two generators, the first major power plant on the Canadian side of the river. The company had been founded by William Birch Rankine, a New York lawyer who had settled in Niagara Falls; he died in September 1905, three days after the station's third generator came into service, and in 1927 the plant was renamed in his honour.
Did you know? The tailrace tunnel was dug between 1901 and 1905 by hundreds of workers using dynamite, pickaxes and shovels, often working by lantern light.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What is the most remarkable hydroelectric power station in the world?
- On our list, Vemork (Norway) ranks first, followed by Toronto Power Generating Station (Canada) and Olidan Hydroelectric Power Station (Sweden).
- Which country has the most remarkable hydroelectric power stations?
- In our collection, the most come from Canada (2), Norway (2) and Germany (1).
- Why is Vemork famous?
- Its heavy water plant was the target of Allied sabotage operations during the Second World War, including the 1943 raid by Norwegian commandos. Vemork is part of the Rjukan-Notodden Industrial Heritage Site inscribed by UNESCO.
- How many hydroelectric power stations are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 7 hydroelectric power stations in 5 countries. Canada has the most, with 2.