Chaira Hydro Power Plant, dam in Pazardzhik Province
The Chaira Hydro Power Plant is a large pumped-storage facility in Belovo Municipality, Bulgaria, situated about 100 kilometers southeast of Sofia in the Rila mountain range. It operates with two reservoirs - the upper Belmeken Dam and the lower Chaira Dam - connected by tunnels roughly 4 meters in diameter, using four reversible turbines that can both generate electricity and pump water back uphill to store energy.
Construction began in the late 1990s, with the first turbines coming online in 1995 and two additional units starting in 1999. It was once the largest pumped-storage facility in Southeast Europe and became notable for its reversible turbines manufactured by Toshiba, which achieved the highest head for a single-stage pump turbine in the world at the time.
The name Chaira comes from the local designation of this site in the mountain region. The facility shapes the landscape with its concrete structures and reservoirs, which visitors can see integrated into the natural surroundings of the Rila mountains.
The site sits at a high elevation in a mountain area with cool, fresh air and forested slopes that can be snow-covered in winter months. The dams and tunnel structures are built into the natural mountain landscape, and visitors should expect moderate physical effort to access different parts of the facility.
The turbines were built by Toshiba and assembled in Bulgaria under Japanese supervision, a rare technical feature for a Southeast European project in the 1990s. Since 2022, the facility has been offline due to turbine failure, making repairs a priority to restore its energy storage and generation capability.
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