The Nizhny Novgorod Hydroelectric Station or Nizhny Novgorod GES is a hydroelectric station on the Volga river. Located near Zavolzhye

Zavolzhye, Nizhny Novgorod Oblast

Zavolzhye is a town in Gorodetsky District of Nizhny Novgorod Oblast, Russia, located on the right bank of the Volga River, opposite Gorodets, northwest of Nizhny Novgorod. Population:...

, Nizhny Novgorod Oblast

Nizhny Novgorod Oblast

Nizhny Novgorod Oblast is a federal subject of Russia . Its administrative center is the city of Nizhny Novgorod. Population: The oblast is crossed by the Volga River. Apart from Nizhny Novgorod's metropolitan area, the biggest city is Arzamas...

, it belongs to the Volga-Kama Cascade of dams.

Technical data

Construction started in 1948 and was completed in 1959. Complex consists of concrete spillway dam, 7 earth-fill dams and 3 dikes total 18.6 km long and up to 40 m high, power plant house, and two single-chamber two-lane locks with an intermediate pond. Installed power is 520 MW, average annual production is 1510 GWh. Power house has 8 generator units with Kaplan turbine

Kaplan turbine

The Kaplan turbine is a propeller-type water turbine which has adjustable blades. It was developed in 1913 by the Austrian professor Viktor Kaplan, who combined automatically adjusted propeller blades with automatically adjusted wicket gates to achieve efficiency over a wide range of flow and...

s, each 65 MW at 17 m head. The dam with total waterfront length of 13 km forms Gorky Reservoir

Gorky Reservoir

Gorky Reservoir is an artificial lake in the central part of the Volga River formed by a hydroelectric dam of Gorky Hydroelectric Station built in 1955 between the towns of Gorodets and Zavolzhye and filled in 1955 – 1957...

.

History

Construction began in 1948. Although it was a medium-size project, e.g. compared to
Volga Hydroelectric Station

Volga Hydroelectric Station

The Volga Hydroelectric Station or Volga GES also known as the 22nd Congress of the CPSU Stalingrad/Volgograd Hydroelectric Power Station , is the largest hydroelectric station in Europe and is the last of the Volga-Kama Cascade of dams, before the Volga River flows into the Caspian Sea...

, it was often called an 'innovation testing range'. It also was the USSR longest dam.

More than 15,000 people came to the construction site. Construction site's infrastructure has been built along with construction of the station. Many industries of Zavolzhye

Zavolzhye

Zavolzhye may refer to:*Transvolga, a territory to the east of the Volga River in Russia*Zavolzhye , name of several inhabited localities in Russia...

 and Gorodets

Gorodets

Gorodets is a town and the administrative center of Gorodetsky District of Nizhny Novgorod Oblast, Russia, located on the left bank of the Volga River, northwest of Nizhny Novgorod...

owe their existence to station construction. Zavolzhye town was built from scratch. 8,500 houses and 700 state-owned and public buildings were moved to Zavolzhye and Gorodets from villages that were to be flooded.

The first concrete pouring for the dam took place in April 1951. The river current was stopped August 24, 1955. November 2, 1955, when the first turbine was put under load, is an official station's launch date. The last eight turbine was run in December 1956. In 1959 generators' cooling system improvement and reinforcement of turbines were implemented, increasing installed power by 120 MW to 520 MW.