Heimbach Hydroelectric Power Station

A power station is rarely the most handsome building in a valley, but the one at Heimbach in the northern Eifel was designed to be exactly that. When it was commissioned in August 1905, its 12 megawatts made it the largest storage hydroelectric plant in Europe, and its owners dressed the achievement accordingly: the architect Georg Frentzen gave it a Jugendstil hall with towers on the hillside flank, a turbine room spanned freely by iron trusses, and a control desk where every meter and switch was made of brass, mounted on marble and framed in mahogany. The station is still running today, operated by RWE, which makes it one of the rare places where Art Nouveau craftsmanship and live electricity generation share the same room.

The water arrives from the Urft reservoir behind the Kermeter ridge. The Urft dam, built between 1900 and 1904 as the biggest dam project in Europe at the time, holds back the lake; from it the Kermeter tunnel runs about 2.7 kilometres through the hill before the flow drops into two pressure pipes and down to the turbines, with a head of up to 110 metres at full reservoir. The plant stands in the Hasenfeld quarter of Heimbach, on the Rur, a short distance below the Schwammenauel dam, so the whole engineering story of the upper Rur — reservoirs, tunnel, powerhouse — can be read in one small corner of the hills.

The eight Francis turbines installed in 1905 ran for seventy years; in 1975 they were retired and replaced by two more efficient machines, which raised the capacity to 16 megawatts. Several of the original sets were kept in the hall, so visitors see the heavy early machinery standing beside the modern generators, and the building also houses an RWE industrial museum. The towers lost their characteristic crowns over the decades and got them back in a renovation of 1990–1991; the station is protected as an industrial monument of North Rhine-Westphalia.

Since 1998 the turbine hall has had a second life each summer as the venue of the chamber music festival "Spannungen" — the name means both "tensions" and "voltages" — for which the turbines are shut down so that string quartets can be heard under the iron roof.

Getting there

Heimbach lies about 20 km from Düren, the nearest larger town. The nearest international airport is Cologne Bonn (CGN), about 55 km away in a straight line. The Rurtalbahn regional line runs up the Rur valley from Düren and terminates in Heimbach, which makes the power station reachable without a car.