The 1969 discovery of oil at the Ekofisk field in the North Sea transformed Norway into an internationally important energy nation. But long before black gold was being pumped from the Norwegian Continental Shelf, Norway’s economy was fuelled by a differe

HYDROPOWER: They called it white coal — the foaming, churning masses of water that tumbled down the side of Norwegian mountains through turbines to create electricity. But when Norway entered the 20th century as a young nation, hydropower was more than coal — it was gold. And researchers from the then Norwegian Institute of Technology (NTH) — now a part of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) — were instrumental in pioneering technologies that helped build modern Norway.

Much of that research took place in the Waterpower Laboratory, an elegant four-story building on NTNU’s Gloshaugen campus in Trondheim, which in 2017 has been celebrating its 100th anniversary.

The oversized pipes used to test turbines and do research were the backdrop to a series of dramatic stories, peopled by individuals who helped electrify Oslo and the rest of the country, aid the Resistance during WWII and help countries like Nepal overcome tremendous barriers in the use of their hydropower resources.

And these stories are still being written, as the Waterpower Laboratory enters its second century. In 2016, the Research Council of Norway created HydroCen, the Norwegian Centre for Hydropower Technology, a Centre for Environmentfriendly Research that will operate until 2024. Here, among other projects, researchers are learning to turn the forces of hydropower to a new, important goal: providing energy in a world that is trying to cut its carbon emissions.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, electricity was seen as the key to bringing Norway into the modern world. This was much more than a matter of just replacing kerosene lanterns with electric lights.

The abundance of falling water in Norway offered the young country a way to use hydropower for industrial development. One of the earliest examples of this was Norsk Hydro, founded in 1905 by Sam Eyde and physicist Kristian Birkeland. They developed a way to use electricity — generated by hydropower— to capture nitrogen from the air to make fertiliser.

When the Norwegian Institute of Technology, NTH, was created in 1910, one of its primary goals was to educate the nation’s future scientists and engineers. NTH addressed the issue of Norway’s hydropower development needs with what Norwegian historians and authors Thomas Brandt and Ola Nordal called a three-sided “hydropower triangle”.

One NTH research group focused on building dams and reservoirs, one focused on turbines and related equipment, and one focused on the electricity itself, such as generators and transmission lines. Gudmund Sundby, appointed to NTH in 1911, had responsibility for turbines and related hydropower equipment, but immediately saw the need for a dedicated Waterpower Laboratory where ideas could be tested and refined.

Sundby had a background as an engineer for Kvaerner Brug, which with Myren Verksted were Norway’s two main turbine producers.

With his industrial perspective, Sundby quickly realised that NTH could offer the two turbine producers help with rigorous testing to improve the efficiency of their turbines. Indirectly, this would also improve the two companies’ competitiveness in the burgeoning international world of turbine production.

First, of course, he needed a laboratory to do the tests. Arne Kjolle, a professor emeritus from the Waterpower Laboratory, said Sundby’s initial proposal to build an expensive hydropower lab was turned down. Kjolle is currently co-writing a history of Kværner Brug, a 150-yearold Norwegian industry that was deeply involved in the nation’s hydropower development.

But Sundby was not one to take no for an answer, Kjolle said.

He argued to the government that Norway had to keep up with the day’s technological development or lose business to the outside world. He also argued that a Waterpower Laboratory could take paid assignments from Myren and Kværner to test turbines.

Under his vision, a hydropower lab would provide engineers a lab for research, a hands-on place to educate students, and a place from companies like Myren and Kværner could test the effectiveness of their turbine designs and improve them.

The first payment of NOK 150,000 came in 1914, with more to follow until the laboratory opened its doors in 1917.

From the first, the idea behind the laboratory proved an enormous success: between testing and development, Sundby and the Waterpower Laboratory were able to improve the efficiency of the turbines they tested by as much as 10%.

Working with industrial partners, they tweaked the number of blades on the Francis turbine runners and changed the shapes and the angles of the blades to improve efficiency. All of this required the technical knowhow and precision that only the Waterpower Laboratory could provide.

And it was work that paid off almost immediately, when the Norwegian government and the municipality of Oslo decided to build Morkfoss-Solbergfoss hydropower station in 1916 to supply electricity to the growing city of Oslo, Kjolle said. Both Kværner and Myren delivered turbines for the station, tailor-made for the run-of-river installation. In the end, the turbines used in the station had an efficiency of 9% — an impressive feat especially because the most efficient turbines today deliver about 96% efficiency, says Ole Gunnar Dahlhaug, a hydropower professor at the Laboratory.

“When you realise that Morkfoss-Solbergfoss cost approximately NOK 60 mln (EUR 6.3 mln), you can see that the direct economic benefits of the testing, based on a gain proportional to the increase of the efficiency, were quite considerable,” Kjolle said. “And the Norwegian state, which owned roughly one-third of the installation, got its money’s worth and more for all the capital it invested in the