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The Statkraft Vikfalli control upgrade will cost approximately €42 million (NOK 460 million) and will replace ageing control systems across three Norwegian hydropower stations, the company has confirmed. The work covers Målset, Refsdal and Hove, which together produce around 860 GWh each year, enough to power roughly 50,000 Norwegian households.
According to ABB, the Vikfalli complex sits 170 kilometres northeast of Bergen on Norway’s west coast, and comprises five generating units spread across the three stations. Målset carries 24 MW of installed capacity, Refsdal 92 MW and Hove 68 MW. The spread of capacity across those three plants matters for what this project is really about: not expanding generation, but ensuring what already exists keeps running reliably.
ABB has been selected to supply the new control systems. Its scope includes installation of the ABB Ability™ System 800xA® distributed control system and monitoring platform, which will be integrated with existing third-party turbine systems to create a unified operational environment across the complex. That integration point is worth scrutinising: retrofitting a modern distributed control system onto legacy turbine infrastructure is not trivial, and the success of the reliability argument rests on that interface working cleanly.
Several local contractors will also be involved at different stages of the project, alongside ABB. The full scope covers a complete renewal of the control systems together with upgrades to auxiliary and common systems, with the stated goals of increasing reliability, improving remote control and enabling more efficient operations.
‘Vikfalli is an important power system for the region, and the work we are now undertaking is essential to ensure safe operations in the future,’ said Inge Hass, Statkraft‘s power plant manager in the Sogn power plant group. ‘We are renewing critical systems that are central to production.’
The project has a hard external deadline. Statkraft also plans investments to adapt Vikfalli’s facilities to grid upgrades being carried out in cooperation with Statnett and Sygnir, as part of a separate project preparing for the transition of the transmission and regional grids to 420 kV. That transition has a planned start around 2031, subject to the necessary approvals, and the control system upgrades must be completed beforehand.
That sequencing gives the Vikfalli work a clear rationale beyond routine maintenance. Plants with legacy control architecture are poorly placed to interact with a modernised high-voltage grid. Getting the control layer right now is a prerequisite, not a nice-to-have.
‘We see this as the first step in a broader development of the facilities and the regional power system,’ Hass added. ‘By carrying out this modernisation now, we are preparing for future developments.’
The Vikfalli investment sits inside a considerably larger capital commitment. Statkraft recently announced plans to invest approximately NOK 80 billion (circa €7 billion) in Norway over the next ten years, with around NOK 70 billion (circa €6 billion) earmarked for hydropower. Against that backdrop, the €42 million Vikfalli allocation is a single line in a long capital programme rather than a headline commitment in its own right.
What the Vikfalli project does represent, in microcosm, is the broader challenge facing ageing European hydropower infrastructure: generation assets built for a different grid era now need their control and communication layers overhauled if they are to remain useful as grids become more interconnected and higher-voltage. The operational carbon from hydropower is low; the embodied and capital cost of keeping it serviceable is not. At roughly €49 per MWh of annual output, this upgrade is a real, if not extravagant, commitment to a plant Statkraft plainly considers worth keeping for decades.
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