Most of my abandoned exploring starts with a goal in mind. It’s either to experience a piece of the past, access a special room, or take a specific photo. My exploration in Plessa was no different. On the internet days before this visit, I saw a picture of an abandoned power plant control room - well maintained without graffiti and a short distance from Berlin. This was the goal.
The journey began with a three-hour train ride, passing the well-trodden ground of Flugplatz Brand and into the unknown. On this Sunday morning, Plessa was quiet, with a few elderly residents out and about doing yardwork, but most of the town was still asleep. After a scouting lap of the block, I jumped the fence and climbed into the cooling towers. The previous day I'd visited Kraftwerk Henningsdorf, and while it was great exploration, the control room had passed its prime – covered in graffiti and water damage. A fresh control room in great condition was something that I had to see.
Once inside, my path through the abandoned building followed the same path that the brown lignite coal took on its journey to be converted into electricity.
From train car to conveyor belt, conveyor belt to storage hopper, storage hopper to one of 8 furnaces in the main building. Rusted catwalks criss-crossed by pipes and hundreds of gauges still surround the furnaces today, unused and dusty – a messy contrast to the new solar panels that now occupy the field next to this abandoned power plant.
Kraftwerk Plessa was one of the oldest lignite-fired power plants in Europe and early in its life, one of the most modern too. Built with a modular design, it expanded in phases starting with supplying 8MW of electricity in 1927 and reaching 54MW in 1942 with the third and final phase. With the exception of the 4th turbine, which was given to the Soviet Union for reparations post World War II, the plant operated fairly regularly until 1992 when it was shut down and disconnected from the grid for good.
Only one of the turbines remains today, partially ripped open and spread across the mezzanine. Below the turbine on the main floor are the remains of the building's second life: a bar, events space, and sometimes a club – built to serve the museum and experience areas that welcomed people throughout the early 2000s.
After nearly two hours of exploring, across from the turbine and through a service room, I found my goal. Control panels filled with buttons, gauges, and switches perfectly housed in travertine stone and green painted panels. Laid out in an elongated octagon with two centre control tables, the various controls are in an amazing condition, at least when viewed from the front. As if a unwritten pact between urban explorers and vandals, it is the only room in the complex that hasn't been at least partly trashed.
I spent quite a while in this room, taking in the surroundings, trying to think about everything this room would have powered since its first creation in 1927. Genocide, divide, reunification... who knows what will come next.
