Now we understand that these projects were never designed or intended to operate 24 hours per day but rather ABOUT 7 hours per day at full plant output. To understand a little more of the system, focus on "lake pertinent information". Specifically, focus on lake area and storage from the following table. (Lake(acres) and Useable Storage(ac-ft))
First let us consider storage (Useable Storage). Water managers measure storage in a lake in acre-feet (ac-ft). This is a volume of water, like a cubic foot is a volume of water or a gallon is a volume of water. It is just a volume of water that is convenient when thinking of lakes. By the way, one acre-ft is equal to 43560 times 7.48 gallons. If you do the math on that it will be obvious why water managers think in acre-ft. By the way, Burton's useable storage is 29.3 billion gallons, which is another reason water managers need another volume measurement.
Another interesting and convenient thing about acre-feet and cfs is that there are 43,560 square feet in an acre. And there are 86,400 seconds in a day. If you "do the math", to convert a flowrate of 1 cfs for an ENTIRE DAY to acre-feet you only need to multiply by 86,400/43,560 ... and if you divide this you will discover it is 1.98 ; many times (almost all the time) a water manager turns a flowrate for an ENTIRE DAY into a volume by merely multiply be 2 (which is about 1.98). So, a flowrate of 100 cfs for an ENTIRE DAY is 200 acre-feet (actually 198).
Note that Burton is by far the largest lake in the system with ninety thousand acre-feet of useable storage. In fact, the total sum of the remaining five lakes is only slightly over half of Burton's storage. Ninety thousand acre-feet might sound like a lot, it is NOT. For comparison, nearby Lake Lanier's useable storage is about 1 million acre-ft and Hartwell's is about 1.4 million acre-ft.
Also, note that Tallulah Falls produces a huge proportion of the "hydropower products" (energy and capacity) of this system. But if 90,000 acre-ft is not much storage then 1490 acre-ft at Tallulah Falls is just about like nothing, in terms of stored water. Previously we computed that the projects operated ABOUT 7 hours per day on average (at full capacity). If Tallulah Falls operated for 7 hours at is hydraulic capacity of 2000 cfs, it would almost completely empty the Tallulah Falls Lake (without additional water entering the project). And that "additional water" is one of the main values of Burton to the system, stored water. Anytime Tallulah Falls comes online (releasing water and producing electricity) then Burton should be releasing water also to prevent a huge decline in Tallulah Falls Lake. In fact, because of travel time it is likely that Burton comes online one hour before Tallulah Falls.