6 hydropower plants in the Republic of Macedonia (owned and operated by ELEM- JSC Macedonian Power Plants) with a total installed capacity of 528 MW, were rehabilitated in terms of monitoring instrumentation and automation of the data.

The hydropower assets include the five embankment dams with clay core of Mavrovo, Spilje, Globocica, Tikves and Kozjak as well as Sveta Petka arch dam.

The monitoring instrumentation in the four dams is to a large extent the same as originally installed and due to careful maintenance the instruments are still in good condition. However, some components, such as the readouts for the cells measuring the pore and total pressures in the dam bodies and the seismic monitoring equipment, were outdated.

ELEM therefore brought under way a project for the rehabilitation of the dam monitoring instrumentation. At the same time a comprehensive program for the automation of the monitoring instrumentation and transmission of the monitoring data to a central auscultation center for all dams under ELEM’s responsibility was initiated.

This transmission of the monitoring data also included the more recent dams of Kozjak (commissioned in 2003) and Sveta Petka (commissioned in 2012), which already had local systems for automatic dam monitoring.