The longest flexible energy supply in the world was manufactured and delivered by European company Hennlich Industrietechnik for the CEZ group (biggest Czech company) northern-bohemian power plant Tušimice II.

“The total energy chain length exceeds 600 m and delivers brown coal,” said Vítezslav Votruba, head of Hennlich Engineering, who designed and manufactured the equipment. “It beat the former world record from seaport in Singapore. To get a better picture of how long the energy chain is, it is like placing six football pitches (fields) next to each other.”

The equipment brings the needed energy into the dump machines that feed the power plant with coal. “The dump has a capacity of 120,000 tons of coal,” said Votruba. “The train serving this dump would have to be 32 km long. It is like you placed the first train at the train station in capital Prague and the last wagon would be in the town of Beroun.”

The technical beauty of this solution is that it enables every loader to connect to any energy supply. “What is special is that we bring five separate energy supplies and integrate them into one supply line to the dump loaders,” said Votruba. “The parts of flexible lead are also optical cables for signals transfer and technological water supply.”

New energy supplies are a part of the power plants modernization whose total cost is 25 billion Czech crowns (about 1 billion euro). This increases the efficiency of energy blocks by 38%. A similar solution that was designed for Tušimice II was installed by Hennlich Engineering eight years ago at the brown-coal power plant Pocerady, also a member of CEZ group. That equipment also served the energy supply for a coal dump in a thermal power plant. It is half the length of the Tusimice plant.