Ireland day 1058. Wednesday 21 August 2024- Turlough Hill

Ireland day 1058. Wednesday 21 August 2024- Turlough Hill
Today’s summary Visited ESB’s pumped water hydroelectric power station at Turlough Hill which was opened to the public today as part of Ireland’s Heritage Week.  It is celebrating its fiftieth year of operation in 2024.  We were there today in a group organised by a friend in the DWC. Absolutely brilliant.   Zero to 292 MW in 70 seconds!  Rounded off the day with a walk down St Kevin’s Way to Laragh and then a video call with family in the evening
Today’s weather Cool, overcast and with light rain most of the day.   Moderate to strong south westerly wind.   Appx 12c at Lough Nahanagan, 17c in the valley
Today’s overview location
(The green mark shows the location of our route)
Close-up location
(The red line shows where we walked)
(Click button below to download GPX of today’s walk as recorded, or see interactive map at bottom with elevations corrected):
Turlough Hill Power Station to Laragh DWC
Commentary

(Summary blog only.   Last full blog was Day 0368).

Well today was very much a day with a difference. Our objective was to visit ESB [the electricity supply company]’s pumped water hydroelectric power station at Turlough Hill, by the Wicklow Gap.   Every year in Ireland at about this time, there are Heritage Week events and this year, as it was celebrating its 50th anniversary, the power station was open.

We have walked in this area many times and I have often wondered what was going on inside the hill, so when someone in the walking club offered to liaise with Heritage Week to secure tickets for a group of us to go on a tour, Val and I leapt at the chance.   We were booked into a 9:30 am tour which gave us a full day to work with, but which had the downside of meaning that we had to leave the flat at 7:30 am, which as readers will know is not our ideal getting up and about time.  Anyway, we got there in reasonable time and joined the rest of the visitors for a briefing in the admin block.

After the mandatory HSE update, we learned a lot about the construction of the whole scheme, which took six years in the early 1970s and which was, at the time, Ireland’s biggest civil engineering project.   The power station has been operating day in, day out ever since it opened in 1974, and can generate 292MW for up to four hours, from a standing start in just 70 seconds.

When it was originally built, cheap surplus night-time electricity from fossil fuel power stations was used to pump water from Lough Nahanagan up into the upper reservoir.   The water was released as demand rose when the country woke up in the morning and in response to other short term demand spikes.   Nowadays, though, it is mostly used for load-balancing intermittent renewables, a role which is going to become even more important in the future as more and more wind and solar is rolled out.

The whole visit was superb, and lasted about two hours.   The upside of the early start was that we still had most of the day left, so the group decided to walk down St Kevin’s Way to Laragh.   A couple of forward-thinking walkers had left their cars there, so at the end we could be shuttled back to the Wicklow Gap, where the rest of us had parked after the tour.  It was an excellent and sociable walk, and it was good to catch up with several members that we hadn’t seen for a few weeks.

The journey back to Malahide seemed to take forever – I was obviously premature a few days ago in commenting that the M50 was unusually quiet as a result of the school holidays.   Because tonight it was more like a car park.   Anyway, we eventually made it back, and just in time to join a video call with family in Canada.   Now it’s time to close the blinds (the nights are noticeably drawing in now), switch on the TV and make the dinner.  Another great day all round, and particular thanks to Linda for organising it all.

Today’s photos (click to enlarge)

Overview of the scheme showing the lower reservoir (Lough Nahanagan) at the bottom left of the picture, and the manmade reservoir on the top of Turlough Hill at the right.   The upper reservoir is appx 20metres deep and holds 2.3 million tonnes of water when it is full.   The upper reservoir is approximately 300 metres above the lower Entrance to the access tunnel.   Very James Bond
In the turbine hall.   It’s as big as a cathedral and is down a 600 metre tunnel Diagrammatic cross-section of the turbine hall showing how the water flow works upwards (pumping) and downwards (generating)
Setting out down St Kevin’s Way to Laragh With the walking club group at the miners’ memorial near to the disused mineworkings
Side tunnel leading to the vertical shaft (at the end of the adit, in concrete) which leads directly into the upper reservoir right above our heads
Interactive map

(Elevations corrected at  GPS Visualizer: Assign DEM elevation data to coordinates )

Total distance: 11833 m
Max elevation: 476 m
Min elevation: 129 m
Total climbing: 321 m
Total descent: -667 m
Total time: 04:14:10
Download file: Turlough-Hill-pumped-hydroelectric-power-station-compressed-corrected.gpx

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