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Imposing structure
The heart of the pumped storage power plant is located 600 metres underground in a cavern between the Emosson and Vieux Emosson reservoirs in the municipality of Finhaut, Valais. It has six pump turbines with a capacity of 150 MW each. Thanks to their flexibility, the machine groups can switch between pumping and generating electricity at full capacity in less than five minutes. The upper reservoir, Vieux Emosson, stores 25 million cubic metres of water, which corresponds to a storage capacity of 20 million kWh that can charge around 400,000 batteries of electric vehicles.

Precise protection against fire
​​​​​​​Securiton was commissioned to implement various security solutions for fire protection in the mountain. The central element is the tried-and-tested SecuriFire fire alarm system specially designed for large-scale facilities. Twenty-two SecuriFire 3000 control centres protect the facility and are interconnected via installed fibre optic networks using SecuriWan. In the complex rooms and the twelve defined extinguishing areas (two per pump turbine), 924 combined fire detectors (SecuriStar MCD 573X) detect smoke and fire, while additional linear smoke detectors respond quickly to smoke and fire in the large cavern. In addition, 165 manual call points (MCP 545X) enable an alarm to be triggered manually. To ensure the safety of employees in the long underground tunnels, they are equipped with a personal location system from Securiton. In an emergency, this system can locate any person in the tunnels and send help immediately.