Olidan Hydroelectric Power Station
Olidans kraftverk
Interesting facts
- The station takes its name from Olidan, originally two farms on the land where it was built.
- It holds 13 turbines of about 10 MW each: four started in 1910, four more in 1914 and the last five in 1921.
- For more than a century it has produced power with largely the same turbines; today ten still work, while three were stripped for spare parts.
- Before Olidan was finished, a small test station built in 1908 in the gorge supplied electricity to the town of Skara, and later served to test turbines.
- Vilhelm Hansen, the last director of the Trollhättan canal company, became head of the new state power enterprise that grew into Vattenfall.
- Water reaches the turbines through the line of an 1844 canal, whose old towpath, where oxen once hauled sailing ships upstream, still survives.
- A brick archive building on the site dating from 1809, built with stone and brick interiors to resist fire, survives in its original form.
- The nearby Strömkarlsbron bridge, also designed by Erik Josephson in 1908–1909, stands on a base that doubles as a regulating dam.
- Ten white-rendered houses for the station's machinists, built in 1908–1909 to designs by Svante Dylén, were influenced by German villa architecture.
Why it is worth it
Olidan is where Sweden learned to turn its rivers into electricity on an industrial scale. Built by the state from 1905–1906 at the great falls of the Göta älv in Trollhättan, the power station began producing in 1910 and was expanded in stages, with further turbines added by 1914 and 1921; it was for years the largest hydroelectric plant in the country. The organisation created to build it, the Royal Waterfall Board, grew into the state energy company Vattenfall, and the whole region around the falls is often described as the cradle of Swedish power generation. The station is still in operation.
What sets Olidan apart from most industrial plants is its architecture. The architect Erik Josephson clothed the machinery in red granite quarried at Vätö in Uppland, the same stone used for the Swedish Parliament building and the Royal Opera in Stockholm, and more than a thousand tonnes of it were brought in by boat. The result is a National Romantic stone monument with the air of a fortress: massive walls of dark red stone set above the gorge. At the peak of construction in 1909 some 1,520 workers were employed here, and the project turned Trollhättan from a sawmill village into a town.
Inside, the machine hall holds the turbines and generators; in the early years visitors paid a small fee to watch from a balcony, and guided tours still show how water becomes electricity. Olidan has been a protected building since 2004, and together with the canal and lock landscape around it forms an area of national cultural interest, named Industrial Monument of the Year in 2025. Most days the old riverbed below lies almost dry, but on certain summer occasions, above all during the Fallens dagar festival held every July since 1959, the dam gates open and some 300 cubic metres of water a second pour back into the gorge beneath the granite walls.
Getting there
Olidan stands on the eastern bank of the Göta älv in the centre of Trollhättan, about 1.5 km from the town centre and within walking distance of the falls and the lock area. Trollhättan–Vänersborg Airport (THN) is about 6.5 km away.
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From the encyclopaedia
Olidan Power Station is a hydroelectric power station located in Trollhättan, Sweden. First opened in 1910, it was the first large scale attempt at generating electricity from water in Sweden. The construction of Olidan led to the founding of the Kungliga Vattenfallsstyrelsen, which later became Vattenfall.
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