Lac du Verney, an artificial reservoir spread over acres at an altitude of m, forms the lower reservoir with 15 million cubic metres of storage capacity. The Grand Maison pumped storage power station comprises two powerhouses that include an above-ground powerhouse for conventional hydropower generation and an underground powerhouse for both pumping and electricity generation. The surface powerhouse is equipped with four multi-jet Pelton turbine generator units of The underground powerhouse which is situated 70m below the surface powerhouse measures m-long, 16m-wide, and 40m-high.
The underground powerhouse is equipped with eight reversible, four-stage Francis pump-turbine units. The rated capacity of each unit is Water flows from the upper reservoir to the powerhouses through a 7. Grand Maison pumped-storage operations The Grand Maison facility operates as a peaking power plant by pumping water from the lower reservoir to the upper reservoir for storage during periods of low electricity demand and by releasing the stored water from the upper reservoir for power generation when the electricity demand is high.
Some of the old wooden house mills in the upper Moell valley remained. They were restored as cultural heritage in recent years. The copyright holder reserves, or holds for their own use, all the rights provided by copyright law, such as distribution, performance, and creation of derivative works.
On average, every second building had its own grain mill, none of them directly in the river due to its swift current. Locals coped with floods and landslides by avoiding endangered sites for the sake of energy and useable land, a scarce commodity in Alpine environments. The invention of electricity and its transmission over large stretches allowed inhabitants to search for optimal production places, as these no longer needed to be closely connected to the places of consumption.
Under the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, the use of hydroelectricity was delayed due to rich coal sources. Nevertheless, the potential was intensively discussed and engineers systematically measured the flow and slopes of rivers. The collapse of the monarchy cut the country off from coal sources in Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia. Hydropower production was the perfect alternative, and gigantic projects were developed. The Hohe Tauern were immediately the object of energy dreams.
Reports referred, in particular, to the enormous drop heights and the potential for tapping the precipitation from both sides of the mountain. Source: EDF see bibliography.
Apart from the sheer size of this installation, its particularity comes from the Promethean attitude of the EDF engineers who, when implementing this project, shifted the watershed between the Ardour and Garonne catchment basins towards the east. Thus, the water captured in the upstream part of the Garonne catchment basin is no longer returned to its natural basin. Figure 7. The area is a very popular tourist destination, each massif receiving hundreds of thousands of summer visitors.
This tourism development has been helped considerably by the hydropower infrastructures, which have made the high mountain areas accessible to everyone, including by motorists. In both massifs, the National Park and the communes that owned the land had to take measures, with the backing of public authorities, to manage visitor numbers in order to protect the environment. These measures involved the introduction of special regulations to control automobile traffic and parking.
Pay car parks and shuttle services to take visitors to the heart of the sensitive areas helped limit pollution and contributed, albeit in a modest way, to local economic and social development. The hydropower structures themselves, particularly the dams, are a source of admiration for tourists simply by virtue of the sheer size of the installations, the reasons for their existence, and the human values they represent in terms of the risks taken and the efforts made to realise such a project.
Tourists are thus interested just as much in the natural landscape as in the cultural heritage, an interest that has given new life to the resource by recognising the existence of an industrial heritage in these high mountains.
But, above all, it has provided an opportunity to open up the entire valley and its string of small villages. From a touristic point of view, improved access has enabled visitors to discover a Roman architecture specific to this valley and unique in the world, which until then was only known to a few specialists. Exploitation of the natural resources of this high mountain area thus promoted the development of two different types of tourism, one based on hiking and the practice of mountain sports in an aesthetic natural area of mountain summits, the other more interested in discovering and appreciating the cultural heritage of the lower part of the valley.
Figure 8. XIIth century. Exterior view. Photo: Michel Wal, In the Encantats, however, the situation is not the same. The cable car, which was built in for work on the new Sallente-Gento power plant, replaced the old system of two funicular railways and the Carrilet little train , which had become obsolete and unsuitable.
It was opened to the public in the summer of and enables hikers and family groups out for a summer walk to climb the metres between estany lake Sallente and estany Gento without any special equipment or physical effort, reaching the high mountain areas in only a few minutes. In the context of this evolution in mountain tourism practices, the old Carrilet represents the materialisation of the complex and ambiguous relationship with these different developments in the landscape.
Figure 9. Old Carrilet Estany Gento : the old railway track has become an easy hiking path for everyone. Made of wood, it has a typical alpine architecture and was built by the Swiss engineer, Keller, in and housed him while he was directing works in this sector of the mountains. For a long time known as the Chalet Keller , it was restored in by the FEEC 21 , and is part of a network of accommodation for hikers along with the other mountain refuges, a certain number of which were also built during the period of hydropower construction work.
The network is a major asset for tourism development, making the Encantats massif a benchmark in this respect. This plan is founded essentially on a programme to set up a network of mountain refuges to facilitate hiking around the massif. The project brings together the locally elected representatives of the valleys of the Gaves and Nestes, the department and the region, as well as mountain clubs, various associations of mountain users and professionals, and the Pyrenees National Park responsible for the management of the Natural Reserve of Neouvielle.
The stated objective is to promote sustainable tourism, by both preserving the environment and developing the massif as a whole. The roads have become major links for tourist flows and worksite housing has been converted into mountain refuges or chalet-hotels offering accommodation to numerous hikers. This has often given rise to a type of high mountain mass tourism, with such accommodation providing the logistical support that is indispensable in this respect.
At the same time, the infrastructures have become a means to change the way in which high mountain landscapes are regarded and are testament to the close links that exist between the exploitation of natural resources and tourism development. Through the prism of two different heritage attitudes, the comparison provides us with the opportunity to examine new ways of managing mountain regions that could be explored in the future.
One of the most emblematic means of promoting this cultural heritage is the hydroelectricity museum in Capdella The project was begun by an association of engineers and was then taken up by the public authorities under the auspices of the Generalitat de Catalunya Government of Catalonia Bezat J. Briffaud S. For the operators of hydro-electric power stations , the biggest challenges are falling electricity prices, tougher restrictions on residual water and opposition from environmental organisations, which are against raising the level of existing dams and building new power stations in nature zones.
The much-lauded Swiss quality of life has a dark side — namely levels of consumerism and convenience that jack up the national carbon footprint. This article was automatically imported from our old content management system.
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