Spichra hydropower plant
| Spichra hydropower plant | |||
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| location | |||
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| Coordinates | 51 ° 1 '25 " N , 10 ° 14' 12" E | ||
| country | Germany | ||
| place | Krauthausen | ||
| Data | |||
| Primary energy | water | ||
| power | 1395 kW | ||
| operator | Thuringian Energy AG | ||
| Start of operations | October 24, 1925 and February 1998 | ||
| Shutdown | January 13, 1984 | ||
The Spichra hydropower plant is a listed hydropower plant on the Werra in the Spichra district of the municipality of Krauthausen in the Wartburg district in Thuringia .
history
The Werra was used to generate electrical energy at the beginning of the 20th century, after it had been used to drive mills for centuries. Between 1909 and 1913 hydropower plants were built downstream from Spichra in Mihla and Falken . The First World War interrupted further development; it was not until 1920 that further power plants were put into operation upstream in Hörschel on the Hörsel , immediately before its confluence with the Werra, and at Wommen .
The Landtag of the State of Thuringia decided on August 4, 1923 to further expand the use of hydropower on the Werra and Saale . New power plants were planned on the Werra, including at Frankenroda and Spichra. On the basis of the resolution of the state parliament, Werrakraftwerke Aktiengesellschaft was founded on September 6, 1923, with its headquarters in Weimar , in which the state of Thuringia (51%), the city of Eisenach (39%) and the district of Eisenach (10%) held shares. The mayor of Eisenach, Fritz Janson , was appointed deputy chairman of the company's supervisory board , chaired by the ministerial official Karl Rauch.
Planning and preparatory work for the Spichra hydropower plant began in 1923; the project at Frankenroda, however, was not implemented. In March 1924, the earthwork and concrete work began, which was delayed in summer due to bad weather and had to be interrupted in November 1924 due to flooding . The machine hall was completed in April 1925 and the raft lock was installed in March 1925. The turbines were delivered in May 1925 and installed by July 1925. The hydropower plant was completed in September 1925, and acceptance took place in October . A 30 kV overhead line was built between Spichra and Eisenach to connect the power plant.
Trial operation of the power plant began on September 20, 1925. The commissioning ceremony took place on October 24, 1925, shortly thereafter operations had to be briefly interrupted due to another flood. By the end of 1925, 1,010,820 kilowatt hours had been generated in Spichra.
The plant initially supplied Eisenach via the overhead line built at the same time; In addition, the rural area around Spichra was also supplied by the power plant from 1926. A 5 kV line was laid in the neighboring horse village in 1926, followed by a connection to Hörschel in 1932, and to Creuzburg in 1933 , which had previously been supplied by the Mühlhausen intercity center . Spichra itself was only supplied from its own hydropower plant from 1933 onwards. In 1932 Werrakraftwerke AG was incorporated into the Thuringian State Electricity Supply Corporation ( Thüringenwerk AG).
In the final phase of the Second World War , members of the Wehrmacht blew up the Werra bridge over the right weir roller of the power plant to stop the advance of the US Army . The resulting damage was repaired in 1946, and overall the power station survived the war largely unscathed. First liberated from National Socialism by American troops , Spichra was in the Soviet occupation zone from July 1945 . The Soviet Military Administration in Germany (SMAD) placed the Thuringia plant under sequestration (SMAD orders 124 and 126) in October 1945 and expropriated it by order of July 1, 1948 for conversion into public property . The Falken, Mihla and Spichra hydropower plants have been assigned to the hydropower plant operations department of the Association of Publicly Owned Enterprises in the South Energy District based in Weimar. The energy district south was dissolved again in 1953 and VEB Energieversorgung Erfurt was founded, whose master area hydropower plants looked after the systems on the Werra.
With the expansion of energy generation from lignite in the GDR , the need for energy from hydropower plants fell. The aging hydroelectric power stations Hörschel and Mihla were closed in 1964 and 1970 respectively. In the early 1980s, the worn-out Falken hydropower plant also went offline. After the corrosion of a weir roller on January 13, 1984, the Spichra power station was shut down. Only the transformer station next to the power station remained of importance .
TEAG Thüringer Energie AG reconstructed the power plant in 1997 for 5.9 million D-Marks. The weir rollers were renewed, new turbines and generators installed, the fish ladder rebuilt and a port for water hikers created. In February 1998 the system went back on line and is now operated by Thüringer Energie AG . In 2009 a fish lock was installed to meet the requirements of the EU Water Framework Directive . In 2011, the pedestrian bridge over the Werra belonging to the power plant was renovated in accordance with the listed building standards.
Technical Equipment
At the opening 1925, the power plant has three possessed Francis turbines with 278 kW, 331 kW and 560 kW, a three-phase - synchronous generator with 1.25 MW and a generator voltage of 5.25 kV , two machine transformers which between 5 kV and 30 kV with a nominal output of 1 MW or 0.94 MW and a smaller transformer for the local low-voltage network with 30 kW.
The Werra was a weir with two weir rollers dammed for the continuity provided a raft sluice with fishway . An inlet screen secured the three turbine inlets. The annual amount of energy generated in Spichra was around 5.5 million kilowatt hours per year.
In the run-up to the restart of the power plant, a new 20 kV switchgear was installed in the Spichra power plant in 1996 in order to convert the plant to the nominal voltage of 20 kV that has meanwhile become common in the medium voltage range.
After the renovation in 1997, the power plant has three generators with an output of 670 kW, 330 kW and 395 kW. One of the historic generators was preserved for reasons of monument protection.
Werra Bridge
A steel lattice bridge, which carries the local connection between Spichra and the neighboring horse village, runs over the weir rollers of the system. When the power plant went into operation, it replaced a previous building a little further north and for a long time was the only road and path connection across the Werra between the Werra bridge at Creuzburg and the Werra bridge near Wartha . In the final phase of the Second World War, the Werra bridge was blown up by members of the Wehrmacht over the right weir barrel in order to stop the advance of the US Army . The damage was repaired in 1946. After the creation of the Wartha / Herleshausen border crossing , the interzonal road traffic between Herleshausen and Eisenach passed through the structure in the 1960s until the road bridge of what would later become federal highway 7a (today: Landesstraße 1017) opened about one kilometer to the south . As the traffic load increased, the bridge was closed to motorized traffic in the 1980s and has been used for pedestrian and bicycle traffic ever since. The over eighty year old bridge structure had to be dismantled in 2010 due to severe corrosion damage. It was replaced by a new building suitable for historical monuments.
literature
- Siegmar Neuhaus: The Spichra hydropower plant on the Werra , Thüringer Energie AG, 1998
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Neue Werra Bridge on Kranhaken , Eisenachonline.de, February 8, 2011, accessed June 25, 2018
- ^ Bridge officially handed over , Eisenachonline.de, May 17, 2011, accessed June 25, 2018