Dalešice Hydro Power Plant

Dalešice Hydro Power Plant (Přečerpávací vodní elektrárna Dalešice) is a power plant on the Jihlava River in the Czech Republic. It has four Francis turbines with a nominal capacity of 120 MW each and a total capacity of 480 MW. The old turbines before the 1999–2007 reconstruction had a capacity of 112.5 MW each. The plant includes the lower Dalešice-Mohelno Reservoir.

Dalešice Reservoir
Dalešice Reservoir lies in Třebíč District in the Czech Republic and is named after the market town of Dalešice. It was built between 1970 and 1978 together with the Mohelno Reservoir as a water source for the nearby Dukovany Nuclear Power Station. As it has the fastest-starting turbines of all dams in the Czech Republic (less than 1 minute to full power) it also acts as emergency source in case some of the reactors in Dukovany shut down (for that reason it was also initially equipped with total capacity of 450 MW to back-up one of the four 440MWe VVER440 reactors). Thanks to the turbine capability to act as pumps, it also plays significant balancing role for distributing network when it pumps water back to the higher reservoir during the night and uses it again to produce electricity during the daily consumption peaks. The gravity dam is 100 m high (the highest in the Czech Republic, second-highest rockfill dam in Europe), so the reservoir is also the deepest in the Czech Republic 85.5 m. The reservoir has a capacity of 127.3 e6m3.

Mohelno Reservoir
The Mohelno Reservoir is through-flow dam, acting as the lower reservoir of the Dalešice-Mohelno pump-dam complex. The gravity concrete dam is 185 m long, 7.75/32 m wide and 38.65 m tall. It creates 7-km-long lake and has total capacity of 17.1 e6m3. It includes single Kaplan turbine (1.2 MW) and single Francis turbine (0.6 MW). In case of total blackout, the Mohelno turbines can jumpstart the Dalešice Francis turbines and together start the Dukovany NPP. Thanks to this the whole Dalešice-Dukovany complex is certified for fully autonomous operation independent of the external distribution network.