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Tuesday, 18 August 2020

ALMATY CHPP-1: HOW IT ALL STARTED (CONTINUED)

Almaty CHPP-1 is the first-born of large-scale energy in the Republic of Kazakhstan.

The station was built by the method of folk construction, its expansion provided an improvement in the electrical supply of the growing housing stock, industrial consumers of Almaty. At the beginning of 1941, there were already four turbine units with a total electric power of 12.5 thousand kW.

Many tests fell to the share of workers, engineering and technical workers during the Great Patriotic War. 87 people left the station to defend the Motherland, 22 of them gave their lives for the freedom and independence of the Fatherland. The one who remained worked for two or three people, ensuring the stable operation of the equipment. Their weapons in the rear were kilowatt-hours, and they continued to give them, despite all the hardships and difficulties, contributing to the uninterrupted supply of electric energy to a number of industrial enterprises of defense significance, which were evacuated from the western part of the country and in a short time deployed to a new location for the production of front products.

During this tense war period, 270 million kWh of electricity was released for the national economy from CHPP-1. This is about half of the amount that was generated by all thermal power plants in Kazakhstan in the pre-war 1940 year.
To be continued