RIVER ON A ROOF.

Waikato Times, Volume 102, Issue 17076, 13 April 1927, Page 3

RIVER ON A ROOF.

WATER FOR POWER STATION. FRENCH ACHIEVEMENT. J. M. N. Jeffries writes from Grenoble in the London Daily Mail:— Nothing is more wonderful than the effortlessness —you might almost say, the peace—with which the power stations of the Waterworld work. They arc transforming industry in more senses than one, for after the fret and fuss and noise of steam, lo come into one of these great hydro-electric centres is to conic into a home of dignity and silence. Dignity and silence arc strange words to use, perhaps, for what, after all, are factories, but they arc justified terms. Some eight miles from Grenoble, just below where the River DraC' llows into the the Romanche, is sucli a station, established there by (he notable j pioneer firm of Bouchayer and Mallet, j The river bed is a vast one of gravel, j There is a collar of mountains all ; about it, and it is only in Hie spring, | when the snows have incited, that the 1 river fills it.

As you come along the main road, which runs alongside the river, you see a couple of locks between some cement buttresses. Beyond them is a low, rather makeshift-looking small dam over an arm of the stream, which looks as if it could collapse without 100 much difficulty. And, indeed, some of if docs, with the utmost politeness, when there is a heavy Hood, being built to do so.

A little bridge takes you from the road lo the locks. The hanks between which it crosses have been cemented, the farther hank being an artificial prolongation of the first buttress of the locks. Between these cement banks llows at present most of the Romanche and into another cement basin. At the end of the basins are more locks, one looking somewhat important, as it is of a lull, TowerBridgcy type.

The Power Houso. And that, as far as capturing the river is concerned, is all. Beyond the locks it flows into a made channel and thence into a conduit, or rather a 19ft or so broad tube of cement, which, covered with soil to protect it from climatic changes, runs like an embankment across country to the powerhouse proper. The power-house is so still and noble it is like a museum. You go in and there arc great stainless spaces of floor, and in the centre five giant alternators, covered pieces of Sphinxes in a gallery. Shafts connect them to turbines humming remotely in built-in caves in the wall.

On the roof, above you, where you least expect it, is the river Romanche. The conduit, in fact, when it arrives at the .power-house, slopes through masonry to the roof, and Hie river, seeking its mountain level, climbs over 00ft lo the tanks and small locks, which there await it. Falling thence lo the ground floor, it actuates the turbines. What an achievement! And with more silence and less dirt than the stoking of a single domestic hearth in a drawing-room, came 15,000 horse-power. By the side of the road ran the cables which took it to Grenoble and to the workshops of St. Etienne, seventy-five, eighty miles | away. France’s Great Plans. Such is a “factory” of the Waterworld of France. Whether that Waterworld may spread iu time all over the country is one of the questions of the future. The French have great plans. The things which militate against the extension of the hydro-electric system are, however, to he remembered. First, there is the general financial situation of France, where shortness of capital restrains plans of every kind. Then, at the present time, it is very expensive ■to construct new hydro-electric stations. These are not insurmountable difficulties, however. They do not think so at Grenoble, where at the University M. Flusin holds with distinction the Chair of Applied Electro-Chemistry and Electro-Metallurgy, and a great new institute is being built to study the development of these industries and kindred ones through water-power. Unused waterfalls and rivers they call “wild horses” at Grenoble, and have sworn to make II.P. of all of them.