The land of Carniola will get a regional hydropower plant: The Završnica hydroelectric power plant and its socio-environmental consequences at the beginning of the 20th century

• In Event: Renewable Energy? Socio-environmental Consequences of Hydropower Extraction in the Alps

Abstract

Scientific studies and historical treatises on the use of hydropower on the today’s Slovenian Sava River focus mainly on the technical parts of hydropower plants and reservoirs. In addition, some historians, geographers, and electrical engineers deal in their works with the industrial development of Slovenia’s waterscape, but usually leave out the social and environmental aspects of hydropower. The construction of such infrastructure had both advantages and disadvantages for the environment in which it was built and for the local population. The paper therefore focuses on the ambivalent socio-environmental impact of hydropower in the villages below the Karavanke mountains in the Gorenjska region of today Slovenia. The first hydropower plants were built in Slovenia, or more specifically in the land of Carniola under Austro-Hungarian rule in the 1880s. The rich water resources of Carniola were extracted already at the end of the 19th century with the construction of several run-of-river power plants.
Efforts to electrify Carniola quickly led to the idea of centralizing the construction of power plants in order to supply the entire region with alpine hydroelectricity. As a result of this early initiative of the Regional Committee for Carniola, construction of a hydroelectric power plant in the Karavanke Mountains began in 1911. The Završnica hydroelectric power plant with a reservoir was built in 1915. The paper shows how the extraction of hydropower in the Karawanks changed and influenced life in riverine villages at the beginning of the 20th century.

Author

• Sara Šifrar Krajnik, University of Bern