Swim around power plants: fish regain freedom of movement

2023-07-15 17:25:00

For decades, fish were trapped by power plants, including on the Lower Inn. Gradually they regain their freedom of movement. After the successful project in Ering-Frauenstein, a three-kilometre-long alternative river is now being built at the Braunau-Simbach power plant on the Bavarian side. The groundbreaking ceremony for this around eight million euro project took place on Friday.
A water bypass has to be imagined as a bypass. This gives fish the opportunity to swim around a power plant. The networking of water bodies creates new habitats in the water, and through the dynamization of the floodplains also on land, for birds breeding on gravel, for example. The EU project “Life Riverscape Lower Inn”, which was launched by the power plant operator Verbund together with the project partners Niederbayern, the nature conservation department of the state of Upper Austria and the state fisheries associations of Upper Austria and Bavaria in 2020, promotes proportionate ecological measures on the Lower Inn.

400 million are invested

Depending on the season, between 2,000 and 6,000 liters of water per second are channeled past the power plant in the bypass. “Eco-measures don’t come cheap, but we think they’re worth the generation loss. In the next few years, we will invest more than 400 million euros purely in ecological measures in Austria and Bavaria,” said Verbund board member Achim Kaspar. Another bypass will be built at the Egglfing-Obernberg power plant.
For Karl Heinz Gruber, Managing Director of Verbund-Grenzkraftwerke, hydropower and nature conservation are not only compatible, but one. “Hydropower is living environmental protection. Hydropower is renewable energy and avoids CO2 per se. At the Braunau-Simbach power plant alone, we avoid half a million tons of CO2 every year. It’s a massive chunk.”

Free course in the Danube

Verbund also operates hydroelectric power plants in the Danube. Some greening measures were also carried out here. “We have created fish passage on the Danube, where fish can actually swim from the Black Sea almost all the way through the Danube. These are unique projects. With our measures, fish research is also gaining a completely different dynamic. Before, these fish migrations were all guessed at, now we know,” said Kaspar. As in Ering-Frauenstein, there will also be fish monitoring in Braunau-Simbach. The migration of 36 different species was thus documented in Ering-Frauenstein.
The aim is for aquatic life to be able to pass through the Danube from the Iron Gate on the Serbian-Romanian border to Passau and further on the Inn and into the Salzach by the end of this decade. “The fish were used to migrating from the Danube to Salzburg. The paths were blocked by the power plants. Now continuity is being created once more, which is a very positive development,” said Hermann Sveda, deputy state fishing master from Braunau.

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