Not much to say really here… Geo and I had been exceedingly intimated by this plant back in November due to 3.30am darkness, mud, little vans driving round on the site and lots and lots of lights on…
FF> to March when a little more forward planning was applied and one sunny Saturday afternoon, Geo, Derphaus, Cregg and I found ourselves inside this overwhelmingly huge Power Station.
Belgium’s largest Thermal Power Station. Now powered down following years of expansion which can be seen in the turbine hall, with the first turbines being commissioned in the mid 60’s and the last, the late 90’s. As demands grew, so did the capacity of the plant resulting in an array of 5 T/G from Escher Wyss Oerlikon of Zürich with ACEC (Charleroi) drivers / shafts and BBC controls / inlets.
Interesting to see the commonality between the power plants of Belgium, the later T/G (BBC / ACEC from 1997/8) were identical as those seen at Maybach whilst the Oerlikon/BBC/ACEC duo from the 70’s were the same as the single red and blue monster at IM.
I fucking love European Turbines. I love their setting, their stance and how buildings and circulatory tiled spaces have been designed specifically around them. Seeing the efforts from our Manchester friends in the UK was enough to spur us on to do this.
Electrabel had attempted to apply modern methods of heat recovery from flue gas and all manner of biomass thingy bobs prior to closure but the 2015 EU Large Combustion Plant Directive had all but killed off any hope of it becoming anywhere near “sustainable”.
We spent a long while here, I tried to get to the roof to get an overview of the site but got hopelessly lost and frustrated in the enormous maze of dead end staircases and walkways in the boiler house so you’ll have to make do with these photos I’m afraid, it was also the only time I've got the 135mm f/2 prime out inside a building:
Dem Turbons.
Boiler houses. Complete with an extremely loud buzzing 2200v mega box which made my chest feel funny when I went near it.
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