Giessen. Walkers in the Wieseck floodplain can now once again enjoy the running water wheel of the Struppmühle mill on Martha-Mendel-Weg. Stadtwerke Gießen has repaired the small hydroelectric power station. "Following the installation of a fish ladder, the amount of water was often too low to drive the system," says SWG board member Reinhard Paul. For this reason, the municipal utilities had to shut down the water wheel in the meantime. Now the SWG engineers have installed a different type of generator, which is also used in small wind turbines. This can handle fluctuating water volumes in the millrace far better than the old one and still generates usable amounts of electricity even at low flow rates.
The installation of the new generator was also an opportunity for the municipal utilities to renovate the millrace: The small watercourse was dredged above and below the waterwheel, and SWG also repaired flood damage that had created an outflow from the Mühlgraben into the Wieseck. "This means that the hydropower plant in the Struppmühle is back in good shape for the coming years," says Reinhard Paul happily. The technical director of Stadtwerke assumes that the demonstration plant will feed an average of around 1000 watts of electricity into the Giessen grid.
The Struppmühle project originated back in 1999 from a co-operation between Stadtwerke and the University of Applied Sciences. In the course of this, the waterwheel, which was already slowly decaying, was preserved in its historical location.