One Show comes to Dinorwig Power Station

the dramas over for another night and all over the country people head for the kitchen to make a nice cuppa but as we flick the on switch in our millions stress increases for others all those people who run the national grid are faced with a huge surge in demand for power you need a virtually instantaneous boost in electricity supply conventional power stations take hours to come on stream so what to do the answer lies in Snowdonia home to Misty Mountains lovely valleys and some very clever people who make sure that the kettle's will always boil without the lights going out we're about ten seconds to go from zero megawatts to 1,800 megawatts which is probably around a sort of demand of whales for the time being so what's the secret this is one of the most remarkable engineering projects this country has ever seen locally it's known as Electric Mountain the electric mountains proper name is Dan Orwig a massive hydroelectric power station which can cope with sudden surges in demand it's hidden inside a mountain called Ella dear within Europe's largest man-made cave with a couple of plastic pop bottles and some tubing I'll show you how one of the industrial wonders of the world generates all that power in a matter of seconds this is how it works right at the top of this mountain is Madeleine Mauer a lake that provides the water reservoir now here's my water reservoir here the water then runs through a series of pipes until it gets to a great big valve and when you open that valve like this the water runs down and begins to turn my mighty turbine here and as that spins look I'm making electricity the problem is though eventually you've run out of water in your reservoir at that point what you do is you use electricity from the mains to pump the water back up to the top so that you can do it all over again the real process starts at Matalan MA the reservoir at the top of the mountain underground in that enormous cave are the gubbins which officially are the world's distt response turbine generators and they're just about to come on stream this is the main inlet valve which is opening right now and it's allowing 60 cubic meters of water per second you can hear it flowing from the top reservoir through this time the water then spins an enormous turbine in here which looks a bit like that one over there which in turn makes this huge drive shaft spin at 500 revolutions per minute and that makes an electrical generator on the floor above us generate electricity it takes just 10 seconds for massive amounts of power to surge into the grid and it can run for six hours before the water runs out but why put it in Snowdonia one of the most beautiful parts of the UK Garrett Jones runs the place so why build a power station inside a mountain there aren't many places that you can choose from in the UK where you've got two lakes that are pretty close together a good vertical separation between those two Lakes and of course then we've got the challenge when we do manage to find a place that fits the bill that went inside a national park so it had to be built inside amount now it all makes sense and every time I switch a kettle on are now picture this place but let's see the last bit of the Industrial jigsaw at the foot of the mountain this is clean Paris where the water finally ends up after it's been through those turbines and then in the dead of the night and this is the club a bit they pump the water from here back up to the top lake using spare electricity from the grid so that they're ready to start again the next day they use cheaper nighttime power to produce valuable peak time electricity very ingenious and a true industrial marvel

Channel: FHCElectricMountain

Views: 14,743

Rating: 4.3939395 out of 5

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Id: SWiURkNnBoU

Length: 4min 12sec (252 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 28 2013