"HPPs ON DRINA RIVER" Višegrad
HYDROELECTRIC POWER PLANT VISEGRAD
The river Drina
The DRINA used to be a traveller like all other travellers-on its direction toward its destination, just like all other waters travel around the world. It had its own personality and its own temper, sometimes good and sometimes evil. Violent, wild and noisy, so much that cannot see where and how it moves everything forward, until its wilderness has been tamed here, near Višegrad and its power taken into human hands.
Still in the 16th century the Grand Vizier Mehmed-Pasha Sokolović, the first man after the sultan in the distant Istanbul, remembered powers of this river, when as a child he was taken across it by ferry to another bank and another world. He kept this memory in his mind, as a picture of homeland, and when he was at the height of his fame he decided to bridge the river building on it one of the biggest bridges in the turkish empire.
Man knew the strength and power of this river for a long time, but did not stopped this powerful beauty until the year of our Lord 1989, when he also changed the landscape and put the river under control. The water which was not able to stop, is now peaceful and obedient in the lake of HPP Višegrad.
A small town of Višegrad is settled around the bridge on the riverbanks of the Drina. Its name was mentioned in the 14th century when it was developed as a commercial stopping place for caravans on the road that led from Dubrovnik to Serbia and Constantinople.
The same road leads to Dobrun where was regional court and three lookout towers in the time of the emperor Dušan. The monastery was built on this place at the beginning of the 14th century. Beside the church there were overnight stays too. The monastery complex has been destroyed and reconstructed many times through the centuries, and finally enlarged it is preserved until today to connect Serbian people from the left and right bank of the Drina.
The Drina river begins to flow by joining two rivers: Tara and Piva near Šćepan Polje. It flows in the south-north direction, and as the biggest tributary of the Sava river it belongs to the Black Sea catchment area.
Basic energy parameters of the watercourse are given in the table below.
| Length of the watercourse | 341 km |
| Source level | 432,5 mnm/m asl |
| Mouth level | 75,5 mnm/m asl |
| Total head: | 357,0 m |
| Average: - Upper course head - Middle course head - Down course head |
1,05 0/00 1,63 0/00 0,93 0/00 0,66 0/00 |
| Catchment area: | 19.570 km2 |
| Height above sea level | 75,5-2.500 mnm/m asl |
| Quantity of rainfall | 700-3.000 mm |
| Average specific flow off | 19 l/s/km2 |
| Average perennial discharge at the source | 157 m3/s |
| Average perennial discharge at the mouth | 425 m2/s |
Studies on using the Drina in energetical and waterpower sense have been worked out contiunally through all 20th century. Regarding that the discharges of the Drina are connected to snow and rain falls with two seasons of small and two seasons of big discharges, every usage conception meant balancing of it by forming of the maximum possible accumulations, what of course collided with influences on the environment and existing infrastructure. The problem was complicated by the fact that the Drina is a border river. Because of all this, a final water management basis has never been adopted.
All this caused an important devaluation of technical hydropotential, especially caused by urbanization, so that in todays situation, a real conceptional solution of using leftover energetical potential on the basic water course would be:
- in the upper course from the source to Višegrad:
- line upstream from Foča: HPP Buk Bijela with fall of 96 m and HPP Foča with fall of 17,5 m
- line Foča-Goražde 3 steps, with fall of 11 m each
- in the middle course from Višegrad to Zvornik 3 steps (Rogačica, Srednje Tegare and Mala Dubravica)
- in the down course from Zvornik to the mouth, 4 steps, with fall of 14 m each.
