Grand Coulee Dam

An icon, of Roosevelt's New Deal and of reclamation and hydropower generally. On the Columbia River in Washington state, USA. It generates an enormous amount of electricity, of which some is used to pump water up into Banks Lake, on the Columbia Plateau, whence it is distributed to the Columbia Basin Irrigation Project. Of course, it also destroyed the salmon run above the dam--but folks in the Pacific Northwest also tend to take cheap hydropower as a birthright! Ya pays yer money and ya takes yer choice--
One factoid about the dam, IIRC: it's the first structure to exceed in mass and volume the Great Pyramid of Egypt. Btw, "coulee" is a localism meaning a flat-bottomed canyon with near-vertical sides. It's supposed to come from French "couler," via the early trappers. The dam is not _in_ the Grand Coulee; the coulee is on the plateau above and now holds Banks Lake.
Another interesting fact: the height of the dam was set by the fact that the reservoir at maximum extent couldn't cross the international line into Canada!