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The "Fábrica de la luz"
- We were just like a family.
– You should understand that the days were very long and conditions required us to make a titanic effort.
A drone lands in the car park of the Salto de Dúrcal hydroelectric plant, which has been listed in Endesa's assets since 1991 when the electricity company formalised the purchase of Sevillana de la Electricidad. On the top floor of the building, in a meeting room, Bernabé Rispal, the head of the Granada group, and Jesús Muñoz, the senior technician, are having a chat with some special guests. Diego Parejo, José Vílchez and José Manuel Melguizo recently retired after spending their working lives dedicated to the production of hydroelectric energy. They are from the area and always had in-depth knowledge of what it meant to work in this plant, which everyone in the Lecrín valley has always known as the "electricity factory".
– The plant was built, explains José Manuel, to supply energy for a kind of cable car that linked the port of Motril with Dúrcal and that was used to import and export goods throughout the valley. The terrain was so complex that a cable car was the easiest solution.
– Before, working in a plant like this was very different. We worked in closed shifts to guarantee the operation," says Diego Parejo.
– In the charging chamber," says José Vílchez, there was a house and whoever was there had no replacement, he was totally isolated. In the past they were even attacked by bandits.
– And it was quite a feat of engineering. It was the largest waterfall in Spain. This is a plant with low-volume flow but at high pressure: 76 kilos/cm2. It also has a different kind of maintenance, because lot of material needs to be hauled and this causes wear and tear on the equipment.
– I remember there used to be two machine operators and a frame operator, and teams of four or five were often required to make repairs on the canal. You would suddenly realise that no water was coming and you had to go up there. Or it might have been in the charging chamber or along the canal and we had to do whatever we could to repair the breakdowns.
– Once we had to rebuild a bridge that was washed away by a flood.
– And can you remember what the examination was like before they took you on?
– It was in Seville. I took my test in a bar, but the syllabus was very comprehensive, although it was here that you really started learning.
"I started out very young," says Vilchez. The first time I came here I must have been 8 years old. My father and grandfather both worked here. And some caves had been built just over there [he points to the place with his finger] where they used to wash clothes.
- And this was open all day- says Melguizo. Families came in and out of the power station as if it were ours.
The sound of a drone humming in the sky. There is clear sky over the mountainside on the border of the Sierra Nevada National Park. It is unbearably hot. At times it is over 35º centigrade. Francisco Rus pilots the prototype. He is 34 years old and is part of a new generation in the world of hydroelectric power, with operating units that move from plant to plant in accordance with operational and maintenance requirements. Nowadays practically everything is remote controlled. Routine inspection of the sensitive points in these installations is undertaken with the help of advanced equipment that hangs in the air just as easily as a ship floats at sea.
The only thing that cannot be replaced by the camera in that featherweight structure for the moment is the ability of the human eye to detect and process anomalies. The gadget operated by Rus travels from bottom to top, in the opposite direction to water cascading down from the charging chamber. The drone rises from an altitude of 851.65 metres where the two Pelton generators are located with an installed power of 3 MW up to 1,619.80 meters where the waterfall of a little over two kilometres starts by entering a penstock. It is just one step towards a fall of 768 metres and in the 1920s, when the plant was built, it was one of the most important of the time.
The vegetation varies depending on the altitude and soil humidity. A combination of thyme, almond, poplar and hawthorn give the area that characteristic aspect of one of the most significant mountain regions in the Iberian Peninsula. A few metres from the water intake, where there is a small dam that controls the Dúrcal River, there is a lush oak grove where you can take refuge from the heat.
Rus advises us that the turbine that was still in operating is about to shut down. The level of the upper reservoir is minimal and the pressure is no longer enough to move the turbine. It is the end of July and the season is closing. We will have to wait for the winter when the peaks will once again be covered with snow, then the turbines can be re-started.
– Sometimes when we were repairing the channel [an 8,643-metre pipe from the water intake to the charging chamber] we were buried in snow up to the waist, Vilchez explains.
– Or we had to hire pack animals to carry parts and tools up to the most remote places.
The difference in temperature between summer and winter was more than 40 degrees in some parts of this unusual environment. In fact, during the construction of the plant, up to four kilometres of tracks were opened to be able to transport all the material and it was decided that the penstock would have to be buried to protect it from extreme weather, which required the operators to become specially adapted and this created an especially strong bond that went beyond the job.
Technological advances have been gaining ground and what once walking for hours is now done by a drone in just a few minutes. It is also easy for SUVs to move along the tracks in the mountains and helicopters have now replaced mules. Perhaps the only thing that has not changed are the two Pelton turbines and the objective: To continue manufacturing electricity.
Bernabé Rispal
Responsible for the Salto de Dúrcal hydroelectric power station in the province of Granada.
Jesús Muñoz
Senior technician at the Salto de Dúrcal hydroelectric power station in the province of Granada.
Diego Parejo, José Vílchez and José Manuel Melguizo
Retired former employees of the Salto de Dúrcal hydroelectric plant, Granada, respectively.
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