Centrale CCOM
THE ABANDONED POWER PLANT IN BELGIUM
‘Centrale CCOM’ is an abandoned power plant in Charleroi, Belgium. The municipality contains an industrial area for the production of iron and steel. The power station was abandoned due to the steel crisis.
In the middle of the 18th century, iron ore deposits were discovered in the region around Charleroi. Eventually, in 1763, a first coal-fired blast furnace was set up. The region grew to a huge industrial site along the river Sambre. The coal mining and steel industry in this area was nicknamed Pays Noir or Black Country.
These photos are taken in a disused power station on the same site of the Charleroi coke plant, the ‘Cokerie de la Providence‘. In fact, the boilers of the power station were fired by a combination of natural gas and coke gas, a by-product of coke production. The station was used to power the nearby steelworks.
The plant housed up to five turbines of varying ages, and ranging in output from 6.5 to 75 megawatts. During 2008 the power plant closed its doors together with the cokes plant and the steelworks just a couple of hundred meters down the road. It was put on stand-by, waiting for both better times and a restart of the steel works. But that never happened. I took these photos of ‘Centrale CCOM’ and the cooling tower in 2011.
