First Orenburg Power Plant

The First Orenburg Power Plant stands on the left bank of the Ural River, at 25/1 Naberezhnaya Street, Orenburg, Russia, and started operating on 28 January 1899 as the city's first power station. The building was built in the Neo-Romantic Art Nouveau style, with Gothic and Romantic decorative elements reminiscent of a palace.

History

The main building housed a machine room, a boiler room, a mechanical workshop and a forge. The station's location proved inconvenient: it stood far from the railway (3.5 versts) and the Sakmara River (7 versts), which made delivering fuel difficult and raised the cost of electricity.

At first the station served a limited number of customers — the public assembly building, the provincial chancellery, the hospital's printing house, the boys' gymnasium, and the apartments of the governor and local merchants; its installed capacity was 916 kilowatts. Street lighting was connected to the station in 1903, and as the number of customers grew, electricity prices gradually fell.

In Soviet times the site was handed over to the Orenburg Electromechanical Plant. Later a cultural and entertainment complex operated here, but a fire destroyed part of the building in 2000. In 2007 there was a proposal to use the premises for a Museum of Contemporary Art, which was never realized.

Today

The building is listed as a cultural heritage site. For now it stands abandoned.