Running the power station

At first, GES-2 was known as the Tramway plant, as it had been built between 1905 and 1913 to power the Moscow tram network. It was the first power station to be constructed at the expense of the Moscow city treasury. In 1922, the Soviet electrification plan saw Moscow’s power stations united into a common MOGES network. The Tramway plant, which by that time powered the central areas of Moscow as well as the tram network, was designated the “second” station (MOGES-2), and what is now Russia’s oldest operating power station—MOGES-1 on the neighbouring Raushskaya Embankment—was designated the first.

Tramway power station in front of the Government House, 1931-1932
Photo by Robert Byron. Courtesy of the Museum of Mosenergo and Moscow Power Engineering

GES-2 was a traditional thermal power station. Six steam boilers were connected to each of its four chimneys. Fuel was burned in the furnaces, heating the water in the boilers and turning it into steam. Under high pressure, this steam then entered turbogenerators designed by the Swiss manufacturers Brown, Boveri & Company, setting in motion the turbines of the electric generators. To cool the steam and machinery, water from the Vodootvodny Canal was pumped in at a rate of 500,000 buckets per hour by two pumps installed in a basement (the present-day Pump Room). Through cables laid along the bed of the Moskva River, a three-phase alternating current of 6600 volts was supplied to tram substations, where it was then turned into a direct current of 600 volts by transformers.

Engine room of the Tramway power station 1911.
City railways, 1903-1911
Publication of the Moscow city council. М., 1912

At first, oil brought in through pipes from the storage near the Simonov Monastery served as fuel for GES-2’s furnaces. In the years to come, the furnaces would variously run on wood, peat, fuel oil, anthracite, and coal, until the station was definitively switched to gas in 1947. GES-2’s boilers, turbines, and transformers were replaced several times with more modern, powerful variants, but each successive modernization became more difficult: there was simply no more room for large machinery at the station, to say nothing of the difficulties of having it delivered and installed. In 2016, the obsolete GES-2 was finally closed, and its duties transferred to the nearby Bersenevskaya substation.

Boiler room of the Central power station. Central power station. City railways,
1903-1911 
Publication of the Moscow city council. М., 1912