slade said:

“The point of modern analysts being that Hoover Dam could not be built today – for any amount of money or time.”

It’s my understanding that dams for power production are an obsolete concept anyway. The reservoir silts up after a few decades. I’ve always wondered if it would be possible to de-silt a reservoir, i.e. let the water out and then haul away the mud to farmlands with heavy machinery. It’s probably one of these goofy situations where the energy required to haul away the mud is greater than the original energy produced by the dam.