Pumpspeicherkraftwerk Koepchenwerk

From 1927 to 1930, at Ruhrstausee Hengstey (a reservoir) near Herdecke RWE built a pump storage station later called "Koepchenwerk" for its planner, Prof. Dr. Ing. Arthur Koepchen.
Koepchen, a member of the board of the then Rheinisch-Westfälisches Elektrizitätswerk, and his ideas sometimes left experts flabbergasted, and there is no doubt that he led energy generation technology into a new era.
Koepchenwerk is peak-load hydro-electric power station. In times of a lower demand for electricity (mostly at night), water is pumped from the reservoir into the 160m higher storage basin on a mountain. In times of a higher demand for electricity (mostly during the day), the water runs down the pipelines and a huge reversible Francis turbine and back into the reservoir.
The storage basin is shaped in line with the summit. 600m x 250m in size, it has a storage capacity of about 1.5m cubic metres.
This capacity amounts to a stored energy utilisation of 590,000kWh, in other words, a full storage basin makes for four hours of full-load operations.
With the exception of a breakdown when the Möhne dam was busted in May 1943, Koepchenwerk was in operation until the 1980s.
The hydro-electric generating set can be activated to a full-capacity feed-in in 100 seconds.
After in 1989 a state-of-the-art 150MW pump turbine station had been commissioned, the old plant was decommissioned in 1994. It has been listed since 1986.
The path along the northern shore of Lake Hengstey runs along Koepchenwerk.

Author: Route Industriekultur/Editorial baukunst-nrw
Last changed on 31.01.2024

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Engineering » Water Management