KraftWerk - Dresden Energy Museum

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KraftWerk - Dresden Energy Museum Energy
Museum
Energy Museum Dresden.jpg
Building of the former power plant
Data
place Dresden, Wilsdruffer suburb
opening July 2002,
2003
operator
Website
ISIL DE-MUS-

KraftWerk - Dresdner Energiemuseum is a technology museum in Dresden . It is operated by Drewag , the Dresden municipal utilities .

Location

The Energy Museum is located in the central Dresden district of Wilsdruffer Vorstadt . It is located in the former mechanical workshop of the former central heating power station between Könneritzstrasse ( 26er Ring ), Schweriner Strasse and Wettiner Platz . Nearby are the Dresden Mitte train station and the World Trade Center Dresden . There is also another museum in the area, the School Museum.

Since December 2016, the former main building of the power plant has been an independent cultural building for theater and operetta performances.

exhibition

View into the "Electricity" area
Various electricity meters

The themes of the exhibitions are the history of supplying Dresden with electricity , town gas , district heating and water .

The history of the city's electricity supply from 1895 to the present is presented in three rooms on the ground floor, covering an area of ​​around 400 square meters. In addition to historical exhibits, interactive presentations and display boards are also shown. The selection of electrical equipment is particularly diverse . Are represented, among others, switches , transformers , current - and voltage transformers , cables , measuring instruments , testing equipment and electricity meters . Many of them were eliminated in the course of the modernization of the urban power grid after 1990 because they no longer met the current safety standards.

On the upper floor, the history of the public gas supply is presented in a 25-minute multimedia show with 3D effects in a 360-degree cinema . It began with the establishment of the first Dresden gas works in 1828, dealt with the industrial boom that this triggered and ended with the use of natural gas in the 1990s. It is complemented by a library and a study, the equipment of which was modeled on that of Rudolf Sigismund Blochmanns , one of the pioneers of German gas lighting .

The Dresden water supply cycle is also shown on the upper floor . A film about these processes can be seen on several large projection surfaces from the perspectives above and below the surface of the water. From the point of view of an animated water molecule and a scientist, the cycle is explained clearly and in a generally understandable manner. The seating in the rooms is in the form of a water drop, with a drinking water fountain in the middle . The exhibition also includes water treatment in plants such as the Saloppe waterworks .

In addition, the history of district heating in Dresden is dealt with in a separate exhibition, starting with the state district heating and electricity plant behind the Semperoper , which was planned from 1895 and destroyed in 1945 , through the former central heating plant as a museum location itself to the current seven heating power or heating plants in the Urban area, including the Nossener Brücke thermal power station .

history

Coal trains are ready at Dresden-Friedrichstadt station for the nearby Mitte power plant (1990)

At first, the current museum location was the old town gasworks , on the site of which a lighting plant was built in 1895 . Under Paul Wolf it was expanded from 1926 to 1928 to form a central heating power station . It was a steel frame building clad with red clinker bricks . It was in operation - later under the name Westkraftwerk - until it was closed in 1994, after reunification with the reorganization of the Free State of Saxony . The search for investors for a cultural use of the power plant building was unsuccessful for many years. While the boiler house of Essen Zollverein mine in which the to Red Dot Design Museum is a quite comparable building since 2002, the UNESCO World Heritage enjoys status, under was listed standing boiler house the heating plant in mid-2006 demolished.

In July 2002, Drewag opened the first part of the museum, the electricity exhibition on the ground floor. After only one month, however, it was destroyed in connection with the Elbe flood in 2002 by the Weißeritz overflowing its banks and had to be reconstructed. On April 5, 2003, on the occasion of the 175th anniversary of the public gas supply in Dresden, which relates to the commissioning of the first gas lanterns on Schlossplatz in 1828, the exhibition on gas was inaugurated and the electricity exhibition reopened.

The energy technology exhibition was significantly expanded on May 4, 2006. On this day, the sections on the history of water and district heating supply opened. Up until then, the museum had had around 16,500 visitors.

For fire protection reasons, the museum was closed from September 2018 to March 2019. It reopened on March 6, 2019.

Web links

Commons : Dresdner Energiemuseum  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

swell

Coordinates: 51 ° 3 ′ 10 "  N , 13 ° 43 ′ 23"  E