IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - September/October 2016 - 85

Nucleus of the European
Interconnected Network
for the Rheinfelden plant, situated mainly on German territory, one of the highly
desired service areas was the city of
Basel in Switzerland. Although the city
intended to produce electricity from its
own hydropower sources in the near future, an agreement was reached. in 1903,
the Rheinfelden Power and Transmission
Company (this was the official business
name translated to English from German)
concluded a subcontract with the hydropower plant at Beznau on the River Aare
in Switzerland, thus making it possible to
deliver Swiss electric power to Basel.
it was the beginning of a trans-border power exchange. in 1908, Beznau
itself extended its interconnected operation in Switzerland with the storage
hydropower plant at löntsch, in the alpine canton of Glarus. Soon afterward,
other newly built hydropower plants on
the Upper Rhine River followed the
joint operation. As a result, a system of
power stations was gradually formed
and worked together, mainly for mutual assistance and better supply security.
What at first was a regional supply
system only on the Upper Rhine River,
within a hundred years grew into a huge
interconnected network in continental
Europe that has, since 1999, been called
Union for the Coordination of Transmission of Electricity (UCTE). in 2009,
UCTE was merged into ENTSO-E (European Network of Transmission System
Operators for Electricity). The interconnected system of the regional group
continental Europe (see figure 4, blue
region) now includes 22 countries with
more than 400 million consumers. The
area stretches from the Mediterranean
Sea to the North and the Baltic Seas, and
from the Atlantic Ocean to the Black
Sea. The Rheinfelden power plant can be
particularly proud of being the nucleus of
this gigantic interconnected network.
september/october 2016

Exhibition Pavilion Following
Plant Replacement
in 2010, after a 112-year service life, the
original Rheinfelden hydroelectric power plant was disconnected from the grid
and then carefully demolished. it was replaced by a modern plant, with the power house now on the opposite bank on
Swiss territory (see figure 5). The new

Rheinfelden power plant has four times
the output of the original one. The power
plant company, now Energiedienst AG,
restored the old Rheinfelden location in
an exemplary manner, by transforming
the old bypass waterway into a fish ascent ladder and spawning site (see figure 5). Moreover, in 2012, the company
erected an exhibition pavilion, "Power

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frequency, often called the European frequency, soon became the standard in most
countries. On the other hand, the American frequency of 60 Hz was accepted in
North America, part of South America,
and in a few other overseas countries.

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