The hydropower plant Keselstraße is a run-of-river power plant of the Allgäuer Überlandwerk in Kempten (Allgäu). It is powered by the water power of the Iller, on whose left bank the work stands.
At the beginning of November 2007, work started on the construction of the new run-of-river power plant on Keselstrasse. The old building from 1958 was completely demolished and a new construction was built. The investment costs amounted to around 15 million euros.
On the 11th of December 2009 the turning festival took place in the power plant. Next to the power plant are the old and listed buildings made of brick, in which up to the middle of the 20th century the mechanical cotton spinning mill and weaving mill Kempten had its production.
The turbines were supplied by the company Andritz Hydro. The two Kaplan turbines have a diameter of 2.35 meters each and are seven meters high. A total of 12,000 cubic meters of concrete and 770 tons of steel were used for the construction. Problems with the construction resulted in the Baugrubensicherung. The airy rock had to be secured with nails up to 12 meters long. The building is 20 meters high, 100 meters long and 23 meters wide.
Every year, 10.5 million kilowatt hours of electrical energy are produced and around 3,000 households are supplied. It has a nominal flow of 64 cubic meters per second. About 5,400 tons of CO₂ are saved each year.
The power plant has a 76 meter long cascade fish staircase that surmounts a height of 5.1 meters. To improve the fish protection also contributes to a 80 m² fine screen. This has a distance of 3 centimeters in the horizontal rake bars.
Since completion in July 2010, the turbine building is called a frozen wave, glacier tongue or star-shaped polished boulder. The power plant owner allows regular visits through the entire facility.
In 2010, the hydropower plant received the pbb Architekturpreis 2010 award: this is a nationwide architectural prize for "exemplary commercial buildings". It should be a milestone in the field of regenerative energy through its extraordinary and independent architectural language as well as the urban integration.
In 2011, the architecture of the power plant was awarded the German Architecture Prize for Concrete.
Source: Wikipedia
de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasserkraftwerk_Keselstra%C3%9Fe