Urseren power plant
| Urseren power plant (1943/44) | |||
|---|---|---|---|
 |
|||
| location | |||
|
|||
| Coordinates | 687 635 / 164 882 | ||
| country |
 Switzerland
|
||
| Waters | Reuss | ||
| Data | |||
| Type | Power plant network consisting of storage power plants , pumped storage plants and pumping stations | ||
| power | Total: 1.27 GW Power Plants: |
||
| owner | CKW , SBB , Elektrowatt , SKA | ||
| operator | Central Swiss Power Plants (CKW) | ||
| Project start | 1941 | ||
| Energy fed in planned | 2900 GWh | ||
The Urseren power plant is an unrealized project for a storage power plant in the Swiss canton of Uri to use the water in the upper reaches of the Reuss . An essential part of all projects developed between 1920 and 1944 would have been a reservoir in the Urserental , also known as the Andermatt large accumulation plant . The project failed due to resistance from the resettled local population and was therefore abandoned in 1954. The Göschenen power plant was built in place of the Urseren power plant .
history
Between 1920 and 1954 several projects to overflow the Urserental were worked out. The initiator of the projects was Fritz Ringwald , the then director of the Central Swiss Power Plants (CKW). A first project was submitted to the Uri government on May 28, 1920 under the name of Andermatt dam and power plant , but was rejected by the local population. With the construction of the Lungerersee power plant , which began in 1921 , the financial resources of CKW were tied up, so that they no longer pressed for a decision on a building permit. The project was still presented to the public.
In the years 1931 to 1932 the Swiss Federal Railways worked out a preliminary project for a reservoir in the western Urserental above Hospental . It would only have dammed the village of Realp and should therefore be a more acceptable solution for the population. However, a geological report showed that the site intended for the dam was completely unsuitable, which is why the project was abandoned.
The Federal Agency for Water struck in 1935 during an investigation of the available water power in Switzerland turn a project with a Urserenstausee before that will be used with a two-stage power plant cascade would. It was the first project that proposed overflowing all the villages in the Urseren Valley and using supply lines to bring water from the neighboring valleys into the lake. The state-elaborated project had no business objectives, so it was not actively pursued.
Before the war, German coal was mainly used for space heating and gas production in Swiss cities. The imports that dried up during the war were replaced by electricity, which is why with the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 electrical energy consumption rose sharply and by the end of the war had almost doubled compared to the pre-war value. There were bottlenecks in the supply, mainly during the winter months, when the production of the run-of-river power plants declined due to the low water level in the rivers and the energy demand was particularly high due to the space heating. There was therefore an urgent search for possibilities for the construction of storage power plants, which offered the possibility of storing the water from the snowmelt in the reservoir in summer and only using it for electrical energy generation in winter.
In November 1940, the project was relaunched under the direction of Fritz Ringwald , then director of CKW, with implementation being tackled by a consortium consisting of CKW, the Schweizerische Kreditanstalt (SKA), Elektrobank (predecessor of Elektrowatt ) and SBB should. The study syndicate for the Urseren power plants was used for the project planning .
A power plant of gigantic proportions for the time was to be built that would have produced 3000 GWh of winter energy annually - for comparison: the annual production of the Grand Dixence hydropower plants is 2000 GWh, that of the Gösgen nuclear power plant 8000 GWh. Based on the price of August 1939, the system would have cost CHF 1.1 billion, which would have been around CHF 8.6 billion based on the 2010 price - around two thirds of the Gotthard Base Tunnel , the cost of which was then estimated at CHF 12 billion. The construction should therefore take place in three to five stages over a period of 20 years, whereby the dam wall would have been gradually increased over ten years.
resistance
Resistance had already arisen against the project of 1920 in the Urseren corporation, the corporation under public law to which all citizens of the Urserental belong, although there were also some supporters from the tourism sector.
When the project was reissued in 1943/44, the entire Urserental would have been flooded and the villages of Andermatt , Hospental and Realp would have been flooded . 140 farms and 663 hectares of cultivated land would have disappeared. At that time there were 2026 inhabitants in the Urserental, there were also 89 businesses and 17 hotels. The new villages along the lake offered as replacements would have had no livelihood as there was no longer any cultivated land, so the farmers would have had to leave the valley. Arni ob Amsteg and the Maderanertal were proposed as resettlement areas, but also areas further afield in the cantons of Lucerne , Schwyz and St. Gallen , as well as the Magadino plain in Ticino .
Since the entire valley community would have been affected by the power plant construction and resettlement could not have been implemented as a whole, there was massive resistance from the valley population to the loss of home and community. The resistance was coordinated by Ludwig Danioth , the then administrator of the Urseren corporation and councilor of the canton of Uri. The slogan of the resistance was: We don't negotiate, we don't sell, we don't give! As the owner of the project, CKW argued in favor of the project by pointing out that there was an interest in the whole of Switzerland, which should take precedence over regional and cantonal interests.
Because of the fierce opposition, the study syndicate for the Urseren power plants tried to reach an agreement with at least some farmers in the valley in advance without applying for a power plant license from the canton of Uri. This tactic was noticed by the valley inhabitants and successfully prevented by violently chasing the engineer Karl J. Fetz, who was responsible for the land purchase, out of the valley on February 19, 1946.
After the license application for the power plant was submitted on May 31, 1946, over 500 objections were received, so that the application was rejected by the Uri government and withdrawn by the study syndicate.
Follow-up projects
From the 1943/44 project, only the Wassen power station was ultimately implemented. After the reservoir in the Urserental was finally abandoned, the Göschenen power plant was built with a water intake at the Urnerloch and the Göscheneralpsee . Fritz Ringwald wistfully remarked in a report about this power plant that unfortunately it only had a fifth of the output of the Urseren power plant.
Projects
Andermatt dam and power plant (1920)
A 75 to 90 m high dam at the Urnerloch would have dammed a lake with a volume of 180–250 million m³ on the valley floor of the Userental. The water would have been processed by a power plant on the right bank of the Reuss in Göschenen, which, if fully expanded, would have had an output of 147 MW. The villages of Andermatt and Hospental should have been relocated. Neu-Andermatt would have been built on Oberalpstrasse near the lake shore, Neu-Hospental would have been built on the opposite side of the valley on the Bäzberg. The planning of the new settlements was handed over to two architecture offices: Neu-Andermatt to Möri & Krebs in Lucerne, Neu-Hospental to Heinrich Meili-Wapf and his son Armin Meili . The developed projects represent the ideal of a rural settlement at the time. The Gotthardstrasse would have followed the lake first on the north bank and would have been led over the lake at Neu-Hospental with a 250 m long stone arch bridge , the Furkastrasse would also have followed the north bank of the lake. The village and the traffic routes on the north bank of the lake should have been protected by massive avalanche barriers.
Preliminary project of the SBB (1931/32)
As the owner of the concession for the use of hydropower on the Reuss between Urnerloch and Amsteg , SBB worked out a preliminary project for a dam wall above Hospental. The 110 m high gravity dam would have created a lake with a volume of 121 million m³, whereby only Realp would have had to be relocated from the villages in the valley.
Preliminary project of the Federal Office for Water Management (1935)
.png)
A 117 m high dam at the Urnerloch would have dammed a lake with a volume of 421 million m³. The villages of Hospental and Andermatt would have been flooded. In addition to the natural tributaries to the lake, the Göschenerreuss and Meienreuss would also have been fed into the lake via feed lines . The water would have been used in the two power plants Pfaffensprung and Erstfeld . The installed capacity of both power plants would have been 396 MW. 1000 GWh could have been generated in winter and 1500 GWh in summer.
Urseren power plants (1941)
A 180 m high dam at the Urnerloch would have dammed a lake with a useful volume of 1200 million m³. The Reuss water supply lines were taken over from the 1935 project and supplemented with a supply line from the Vorderrheinwasser . In summer, water would also have been pumped from Lake Lucerne into the Urseren reservoir. This would have required 2000 GWh of energy annually. The water of the Urserensee would have been used in the three stages Pfaffensprung, Amsteg and Seedorf . The installed power of all centers would have been 948 MW. In winter 2800 GWh could have been produced. The power plant was thus a pumped storage system that would have produced only 800 GWh of net energy per year. It was feared that the energy for pumping up the water would have been difficult to find and that the operation of the system would therefore have been uneconomical, which is why the pumping operation from Lake Lucerne was no longer provided for in the 1943/44 project.
Urseren power plants (1943/44)
Urseren reservoir and dam wall were similar to the project from 1941, but the wall was increased to 208 m. The dam crest of the gravity dam would have been 550 m long and 4.7 million m³ of concrete would have been planned for the ten-year construction.
The Urserensee would have been filled with water from other supply lines instead of water from Lake Lucerne. It should now also be fed from the eastern flank of the Reuss valley. In addition, a pumping power station was to be built in Brunnital , from whose equalization basin water would have been pumped with the Hüfi pumping station into the eastern Reuss feeder. Another pumping station was planned in Sedrun, which would have pumped water from a reservoir near Curaglia into the Vorderrhein inlet. The envisaged supply lines would have had a total length of 86 km.
The Urserensee would have supplied two large power plants in Pfaffensprung and Erstfeld , as well as a smaller pump power plant in Göschenen , and the Wassen power plant , which is being planned independently of the Urseren power plant, and the existing SBB power plant in Amsteg would have been supplied with water, with the output of the power plant in Amsteg being increased would. The entire power plant network would have been built in stages up to a full capacity of 1.27 GW. 2900 GWh could have been made available in winter.
Traffic routes
Several traffic routes would have had to be laid or secured for the project:
- The Schöllenenstrasse would have maintained the existing course until shortly before the Teufelsbrücke, if it had then followed the road on the Bäzberg, the junction of which is now in an avalanche gallery halfway between Göschenen and Andermatt. From this road, a short connection would have reached the top of the dam, where the traffic would have crossed the Schöllenen Gorge and then led along the eastern shore of the lake to the new Urseren settlement .
- The Schöllenenbahn would have used the existing route to below the Urnerloch and would have reached the top of the dam with a spiral tunnel . The Urnerloch stop would have been built at the foot of the dam .
- The railway line over the Oberalp Pass would have been led into Urseren station from the north with a new spiral tunnel. As a result, the trains on the Chur – Brig connection would have had to make a hairpin in the station, just like the existing route.
- Rail and road in the direction of the Furka Pass and Gotthard Pass would have followed the southern shore of the lake.
- In this project, the effects on the Gotthard tunnel were also examined for the first time . The tunnel would have had to be partially rebuilt in the event that it would have been deformed by the additional pressure from the reservoir or water ingress would have occurred. Similar to the Lötschberg tunnel, the new tube would have been led in an arc around the fault zone. At first it was supposed to have two lanes, but later it was only planned to have a single lane. After the construction of the single-lane bypass tube, it was planned to route all traffic through this tube, while the existing tube would have been reinforced from the inside so that at least one track could have been placed in the old tube. For the project, a tunnel niche was created in the Gotthard tunnel at kilometer 2.8, from which the Zurich-based company Swissboring carried out test drillings in order to research the geology of the future lake basin.
- For the construction of the dam was a Göschenen from running in a tunnel normalspuriges SBB siding provided which would have been enough to below the base of the wall.
literature
- Erich Haag: Limits of technology: The resistance against the Urseren power plant project. Chronos-Verlag, 2004, ISBN 978-3-0340-0694-1 ( PDF, 3.4 MB [accessed September 29, 2016]).
- Thomas Brunner: Neu-Andermatt, Neu-Hospental. Planned home for the Ursern reservoir project in 1920 . In: Art + Architecture in Switzerland . tape 54 , 2003, p. 6–12 , doi : 10.5169 / seals-394251 .
- E. Meyer-Peter, Th. Frey: The 1943/44 project of the Urseren power plants: structural report, submitted on behalf of the study syndicate for the Urseren power plants . In: Schweizerische Bauzeitung . tape 126 .
- Part 1: Introduction, water management basis, geological conditions . No. 11 , September 15, 1945, p. 105–110 , doi : 10.5169 / seals-83722 .
- Part 2: Description of the facilities: Reservoir . No. 12 , September 22, 1945, p. 127–130 , doi : 10.5169 / seals-83726 .
- Part 3: Description of the plants: power plants . No. 13 , September 29, 1945, p. 141-146 , doi : 10.5169 / seals-83730 .
- Part 4: Energy industry, expansion program, cost calculation, concluding remarks . No. 14 , October 6, 1945, p. 155–159 , doi : 10.5169 / seals-83734 .
- Hans Danioth: The large Ursern power plant project as reflected in the times: February 19, 1946: riot or popular uprising? In: Historischer Verein Uri (ed.): Historisches Neujahrsblatt . tape 100 , 2009, doi : 10.5169 / seals-405872 .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ At that time, ß still existed in Swiss Standard German
- ↑ Großakkumulierwerk Andermatt . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung . 1267 evening edition, August 11, 1942, p. Title page ( nzz.ch [PDF]).
- ↑ Haag, p. 36
- ↑ Meyer-Peter / Frey, p. 105
- ↑ Haag, p. 38
- ↑ Haag, pp. 55-56
- ^ Alpiq Switzerland: Grande Dixence. In: www.alpiq.ch. Retrieved October 17, 2016 .
- ↑ Gösgen nuclear power plant . In: Wikipedia . October 17, 2016 ( article [accessed October 17, 2016]).
- ↑ Gotthard Base Tunnel . In: Wikipedia . October 15, 2016 ( article [accessed October 17, 2016]).
- ^ Danioth, p. 87
- ^ Danioth, p. 88
- ^ Danioth, p. 89
- ↑ Erich Herger: History: Shoe nail prints haunt him . In: Lucerne newspaper . February 20, 2016 ( luzernerzeitung.ch ).
- ↑ Erich Aschwanden: "Night of riot" saves Andermatt from ruin . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung . February 15, 2016, ISSN 0376-6829 ( nzz.ch ).
- ^ Fritz Ringwald: The Göschenen power plant. Geographic study of the utilization of the Reuss . In: Geographica Helvetica . tape 18 , no. 4 , 1963, pp. 305 , doi : 10.5169 / seals-44946 .
- ↑ Haag, p. 26
- ↑ Brunner
- ↑ Meyer-Peter / Frey, p. 127
- ↑ a b c d Meyer-Peter / Frey, p. 130
- ↑ Meyer-Peter / Frey, p. 110
Lucendro |
Göschenen |
Wassen |
Amsteg |
Lake Lucerne |
Mühlenplatz |
Town Hall |
Pearls |
Ottenbach |
Bremgarten-Zufikon |
Bremgarten-Bruggmühle |
Windisch
not built: Urseren power plant