Adolf Beikircher

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Adolf Beikircher (born March 12, 1906 in Mühlen in Taufers , South Tyrol ; † May 19, 1979 in Bruneck ) was a director of the electricity and waterworks of the city of Bruneck, freelance project engineer for hydropower plants, head of the electro-mechanical workshop Gustav Beikircher and advisor to the South Tyrolean Politician on issues of energy policy in the context of the autonomy negotiations with Italy in the 1960s and 1970s.

Training and professional activity

Adolf Beikircher was the son of Gustav Beikircher , who continued the "electromechanical workshops" founded by his father Josef Beikircher and primarily dedicated to the construction of turbines. In 1918 he attended the German-speaking state high school of the Augustinian Canons in Brixen and was housed in the Kassianeum boarding school. In 1925 he completed his Matura in Italian because fascism, which had meanwhile ruled Italy, had banned the German language of instruction, and he began studying electrical engineering at the Turin Polytechnic . In 1930 he was promoted to Dr.-Ing. doctorate and passed the state examination in Milan the following year . He then attended the cadet school in Pola , which he graduated with the rank of lieutenant , whereupon he was incorporated into the air defense in Rome and served there until 1932.

He began his professional activity with the planning of small power plants, which were then manufactured in the workshops of his father's company in Mühlen .

Beikircher successfully applied for a job at the Bruneck municipality's electricity company and was placed as technical manager under the director Nicola Tau appointed by the fascists. After the mismanagement of the previous private management of the plant, Beikircher succeeded in increasing the power supply before the end of the Second World War by overhauling and partially converting the turbines in the main headquarters in Gais , by building an additional plant and three transformer cabins in Bruneck.

Because of the Abyssinian War , Beikircher was called up to Alessandria for car troop No. 2, where he had to be ready for a front mission from 1935 to 1936. At the end of the same year he married Flora von Ingram, who came from Bolzano . The sons Ivo , Hugo and Konrad came from the marriage . At the same time he joined the Völkischer Kampfring Südtirol (VKS), a secret organization geared towards Greater Germany and National Socialism. In September 1939 he conducted secret negotiations with Prince-Bishop of Brixen Johannes Geisler and his vicar general Johannes Untergasser for them regarding the upcoming option at Bruneck Castle . When this option was carried out in South Tyrol in 1939, he decided to leave the country with his family. As a result, he became an optante and at the same time a German citizen, but was initially allowed to remain in Bruneck in order to continue to ensure the city's water and electricity supply. He was also used to carry out the emigration in practice. He was appointed group leader in the Industry Department, which meant that he and his employees were responsible for determining the real value of all industrial companies, electrical works, sawmills, art mills, etc., which the Italian state then had to replace for the emigrants. In this position he was called to Germany several times for political trainings.

In the course of the Second World War, the enthusiasm for the commitment to the German Reich subsided and many of the commissioners, including Beikircher, tried by all means to delay emigration, if not to bring it to a standstill. After the invasion of the German troops in September 1943 and the associated establishment of the “Alpine Foreland Operations Zone”, Beikircher was confirmed as head of the municipal electrical works in Bruneck. In addition to the provisional management of the electrical works of Sand in Taufers and Toblach (with Vierschach ), he was also given responsibility for air protection in the Pustertal valley.

1945 to 1953

After the end of the war, Beikircher made use of the right of return option and also underwent a denazification process , so that in 1946 he was again granted Italian citizenship. He was now appointed director of the city's electricity and water works. As such, he endeavored to meet the city's soaring electricity needs. Through various measures z. B. the expansion of the uppermost slope of the Mühlbacher river and the completion of a first production group of a new plant, the independence of the power supply of the city of Bruneck could be maintained.

All his life Beikircher pursued the goal of achieving independence for South Tyrol from large Italian corporations in energy issues. As early as 1947 he founded the non-profit Pustertaler Energiegesellschaft (PEG), which all municipal utilities in the Pustertal as well as 16 municipal or faction administrations, some industrial companies in the area between Sesto and Mühlbach and some private subscribers joined. The coverage of the electricity needs of the Pustertal should be achieved with the construction of a power plant fed by the Mühlwalderbach, the project of which Beikircher had made the subject of his dissertation in Turin in 1930 ("Tesi di laurea. Impianto idroelettrico sul Rio Selva dei Molini"). With this he took up a plan of his grandfather Josef . In 1948 the PEG received a provisional building permit. Due to political circumstances, the start of construction was repeatedly postponed, so that the Belluno private company INDEL (Società Industrie Elettriche) was able to submit a counter-project to divert the Mühlwalderbach. The ministry issued the final building permit to INDEL in 1958, with the condition that the PEG would supply 1,900,000 kWh of electricity per year at cost price to the PEG for a period of 60 years.

On the other hand, Beikircher succeeded in averting the complete drainage of the Rienza bed when the large Montecatini concern was about to start construction on a large power plant in 1949. Here, near Olang, the Rienza with all its tributaries was to be diverted from its brook bed, led through a tunnel into the Val Badia, and there merged with the river Gader . Only below St. Lorenzen , where the location for the headquarters of the large power plant was planned, the two combined rivers should be fed back to their old stream bed. Through submissions to various ministries and media public relations work, Beikircher saved parts of the Puster Valley including Brunico and the Val Badia from their river beds being completely drained. At that time he was generally considered the “savior of Rienza” with much public praise. The South Tyrolean People's Party then offered him to nominate him for a seat in the state parliament. However, Beikircher declined for professional and family reasons.

1950s to 1970s

After the death of his father Gustav in 1953, Beikircher took over the management of the workshops in Mühlen. In return for a partial wage waiver, the city of Bruneck made it possible for him to limit his activities as director of the electricity and waterworks. Beikircher now had three major spheres of activity, as director of the Bruneck electricity and waterworks, as owner of the mechanical workshops in Mühlen and as freelance designer and consultant for electrical works, communities, companies, cooperatives and larger private entrepreneurs throughout South Tyrol.

After the per capita consumption of water and electricity increased fourfold in a short time in the 1950s and 1960s, Beikircher began to build new sources for the city of Bruneck with regard to the water supply ( Lamprechtsburg , Reischach ) and the first successful ones Attempts to use deep wells and appropriate pumping systems to increase the amount of water available on the surface by adding groundwater. In the field of electricity, electricity was initially purchased. However, in order to achieve self-sufficiency, the construction of a new large power plant was essential. On behalf of a society of Bruneck citizens who owned water rights to the Rienza, Beikircher worked out a project that earned him a lot of hostility, although, unlike the previous Montecatini project, it guaranteed a minimum amount of residual water that would always remain in the river bed. Despite all odds, this power plant was built with financial support from the city of Bruneck and put into operation in 1963. Two years later, however, as part of the new Italian energy policy, it was expropriated and subordinated to the state authority ENEL .

The economic development of these years also resulted in a significant increase in orders for the Mühlen company. Up to now the construction of Pelton and Francis turbines was restricted to the construction of the Kaplan turbine . Now the range of turbines manufactured in the Beikircher workshops was complete. Such Kaplan turbines, which were not built by any of the direct competitors at the time, were now increasingly used by Beikircher, for example at the large power station of the cotton spinning mill in Bozen St. Anton, at the Wierenwerk of the Rieper company in Vintl, at the headquarters of the ENEL power station Campolessi in Friuli and many others, all of which are still in operation today (2018). He was called in for technical advice in all of South Tyrol, from various power plants to numerous individuals from regional or local politics. That is why he was called in by the responsible South Tyrolean politicians as a permanent advisor on energy issues for autonomy negotiations.

The last major project supervised by Beikircher was the implementation of the plan to build a large hydropower plant on the Kniepass, southwest of St. Lorenzen, for the energy-efficient use of the combined rivers Rienz, Gader and Ahr for the city of Bruneck. The idea came from Anton Lageder, the input project (progetto di massima) was carried out in 1975 by his predecessor and mentor Adolf Beikircher. This was an environmentally friendly continuous flow system with a small reservoir that nature offered.

Beikircher died on May 19, 1979 as a result of a stroke.

After almost four decades, the Tyrolean press published a statement by the South Tyrolean governor Arno Kompatscher at the end of 2015, according to which all nine major South Tyrolean power plants are now in South Tyrolean hands. This also achieves the goal that Beikircher strived for throughout his life.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Josef Beikircher Allee 7, I 39032 Mühlen - Sand in Taufers, South Tyrol, Italy. The archive includes plans, photographs and correspondence of the company and the family members and, above all, the diaries kept by Adolf Beikircher (106 volumes with a total of 31,976 pages).
2. ^ Copy of the original document in the Beikircher archive.
3. ↑ See Leopold Steurer: "South Tyrol between Rome and Berlin", 1980, p. 395, Europaverlag Vienna, Munich, Zurich.
4. ↑ See Dr Hubert Stemberger: "80 Years of the Municipal Electricity and Waterworks Bruneck", 1984, p. 60, self-published.
5. ^ Copy of the document in the Beikircher archive.
6. ↑ Management - Stadtwerke Bruneck , accessed on October 8, 2019
7. ↑ The second production group went into operation in November 1951.
8. ↑ See e.g. B. Pustertaler Bote from December 15, 1950.
9. ↑ See the remarks by Beikircher in Dolomiten of February 17, 1962.
10. ↑ An interesting comparison emerges from the accountability report stored in the Beikircher archive, which the fascist authorities had requested in 1928: it lists that the company, from its beginnings in 1893 to 1928, included no fewer than 39 small to medium-sized power plants and 14 sawmills , Built 4 large material elevators and three art mills.