Szablyár Péter: Sky-high - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2007)
Smokestacks
Driving into the car park one is greeted by the sight of a modern, 21st century plant. The buildings are dominated by the colour yellow, everything is neat and orderly and very few people can be seen. The closed refuse collector vehicles familiar from the city empty, one after the other, their payload into the ten-thousand cubic metre bunker, whence everything goes into a hell of all-consuming fire inside the furnaces. After being cleansed of their pollutants in a special collector, flue gases are exhausted into the air through a 120-metre tall smokestack. The huge chimney, which was built with sliding-shutter technology, is anchored by a rein- forced-concrete sheet sunk 3.7 metres into the ground. At its bottom, the stack has an outer diameter of 13.12 metres, while at the top it measures 4.4 metres across on the outside. Its wall thickness is 32 centimetres below and 20 above. The concrete fuel-gas stack can be ascended via a 290-rung ladder starting from the top of the technological unit below. It is at the upper rim of the red and white flight-safety collar (at 75 metres) that we can step on the first balcony and then, having mustered up more strength, we can climb on to the second balcony at the top (at 118 metres). The sight is well worth the effort: North Pest stretches out as a map underneath, and the slopes of the Gödöllő Hills seem to be at arm’s length, too, with the flue-gas stack of the North Buda Heating Plant beckoning from the distance, and the stream of cars rolling down the M3 motorway toward the awakening city. A "pencil" on the edge of Óbuda the smokestack of the North Buda Heating Plant No. 49 Kunigunda útja, District III Turning north from Hármashatár Hill, one can see a giant pencil rise from Kaszásdűlő next to Aranyhegy Brook separating the Buda Hills from the Pilis. This is the smokestack servicing the North Buda Heating Plant of the Budapest District Heating Private Limited Company or Főtáv. There is no thick smoke swirling from the sky- high stack of this lonesome giant as it is natural gas that the furnaces burn here for most of the year. The 188 megawatts of energy produced in the furnaces of the plant is used to provide heating and hot water for 20,000 flats in winter and hot water for 40.000 plants in summer. New gas turbines are currently installed next to the existing ones for the purposes of combined heat and power production. In a CPH facility, electric energy 57
