Scholven Power Station is a

coal-fired power plant A coal-fired power station or coal power plant is a thermal power station which burns coal to generate electricity. Worldwide, there are about 8,500 coal-fired power stations totaling over 2,000 gigawatts capacity. They generate about a th ...

Gelsenkirchen Gelsenkirchen (, , ; wep, Gelsenkiärken) is the 25th most populous city of Germany and the 11th most populous in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia with 262,528 (2016) inhabitants. On the Emscher River (a tributary of the Rhine), it lies ...

, Germany. With an installed capacity of 2,126

megawatt The watt (symbol: W) is the unit of Power (physics), power or radiant flux in the International System of Units, International System of Units (SI), equal to 1 joule per second or 1 kg⋅m2⋅s−3. It is used to quantification (science), ...

s, it is one of the largest

power station A power station, also referred to as a power plant and sometimes generating station or generating plant, is an industrial facility for the generation of electric power. Power stations are generally connected to an electrical grid. Many p ...

s in Europe. It is owned by

Uniper Uniper SE �juːnipɚis an energy company based in Düsseldorf, Germany. The name of the company is a portmanteau of "unique" and "performance" given by long-term employee Gregor Recke. Uniper was formed by the separation of E.ON's fossil fuel ...

Structure

Two power station units present on the location were beaconed up to their shut-down with oil. The power produced in the power station Scholven covers about 3% of the German current need. The units B - E, the long-distance heating power station Buer (FWK) and the steam work Scholven (DWS) supply steam to neighbouring chemistry enterprises and long-distance heating to some surrounding cities. The 302-metre-high

chimney A chimney is an architectural ventilation structure made of masonry, clay or metal that isolates hot toxic exhaust gases or smoke produced by a boiler, stove, furnace, incinerator, or fireplace from human living areas. Chimneys are typic ...

s, which are the second highest in Germany, form an impressing industrial skyline together with the 7

cooling tower A cooling tower is a device that rejects waste heat to the atmosphere through the cooling of a coolant stream, usually a water stream to a lower temperature. Cooling towers may either use the evaporation of water to remove process heat and ...

s. An interesting feature is that the smokestack used by units B-E has three booms, at which the conductors of the 220 kV-line leaving Unit D are fixed. The power station area and the neighbouring waste dump of the

coal mine Coal mining is the process of extracting coal from the ground. Coal is valued for its energy content and since the 1880s has been widely used to generate electricity. Steel and cement industries use coal as a fuel for extraction of iron from ...

''Scholven'' became a film scene in the

Tatort ''Tatort'' ("Crime scene") is a German language police procedural television series that has been running continuously since 1970 with some 30 feature-length episodes per year, which makes it the longest-running German TV drama. Developed by ...

"The ball in the body" of 1979.

History

The power station was an enterprise for the covering of the internal requirement at river and steam of the coal mine ''Scholven''. Soon however, a high performance main power station developed from it. In the years 1968 to 1971 the almost identically constructed blocks B to E went into operation, in 1974 and 1975 followed G and H (50% portion of RWE power), 1979 the block F and at the end of 1985 the long-distance heating power station Buer (FWK). Block G was shut down in summer 2001 and Block H finally in summer 2003.

External links

* http://www.skyscraperpage.com/diagrams/?b2604 Buildings and structures in Gelsenkirchen Coal-fired power stations in Germany Chimneys in Germany Uniper Economy of Gelsenkirchen {{Germany-powerstation-stub