It’s so cool to see in person, we went a while back and since we’d come specifically but there were no boats booked to go through it, they very kindly turned it for us.

Proper engineering 10/10

1.5kWh of energy, not power.

And it’s not lifting 500 tons. Each bucket weighs 500 tons (regardless of boat or no boat, due to displacement physics), it is in almost perfect balance. The motor simply has to rotate the mechanism against frictional losses.