Dalešice Hydro Power Plant

Upgraded Czech dam

Dalešice Hydro Power Plant is a power plant on the Jihlava River in the Czech Republic. It has four Francis turbines with a nominal capacity of each and a total capacity of The old turbines before the 1999–2007 reconstruction had a capacity of each. The plant includes the lower Dalešice Mohelno 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 high (the highest in the Czech Republic, second highest rockfill dam in Europe), so the reservoir is also the deepest in the Czech Republic The reservoir has a capacity of .

The Mohelno Reservoir is through flow dam, acting as the lower reservoir of the Dalešice Mohelno pump dam complex. The gravity concrete dam is long, 7.75/32 m wide and 38.65 m tall. It creates 7 km long lake and has total capacity of 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.