Barry Power Station was a 230 MWe gas-fired powe
station
on ''Sully Moors Road'' in Sully in the

Vale of Glamorgan The Vale of Glamorgan ( cy, Bro Morgannwg ), often referred to as The Vale, is a county borough in the south-east of Wales. It borders Bridgend County Borough to the west, Cardiff to the east, Rhondda Cynon Taf to the north, and the Bristol C ...

Wales Wales ( cy, Cymru ) is a Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. It is bordered by England to the Wales–England border, east, the Irish Sea to the north and west, the Celtic Sea to the south west and the ...

. It was eight miles west of

Cardiff Cardiff (; cy, Caerdydd ) is the capital and largest city of Wales. It forms a principal area, officially known as the City and County of Cardiff ( cy, Dinas a Sir Caerdydd, links=no), and the city is the eleventh-largest in the United Kingd ...

and was situated next to a large

Ineos INEOS Group Limited is a British multinational chemicals company headquartered and registered in London. , it is the fourth largest chemical company in the world. Ineos is organised into about 20 standalone business units, each with its own b ...

Vinyls chemicals works that makes PVC and a Hexion Chemicals plant.

History

Construction began in January 1997 and it was opened on 7 September 1998, being owned by the

AES Corporation The AES Corporation is an American utility and power generation company. It owns and operates power plants, which it uses to generate and sell electricity to end users and intermediaries like utilities and industrial facilities. AES is headquart ...

but trading as AES Barry Ltd. Until 2000 it ran as a base load station. It was bought by

Centrica Centrica plc is a British multinational energy and services company with its headquarters in Windsor, Berkshire. Its principal activity is the supply of electricity and gas to consumers in the United Kingdom and Ireland. It is the largest su ...

on 24 July 2003 for £39.7m. AES sold the plant because of the low price of electricity at that time. The closure of the plant was proposed in Centrica's accounts in February 2012, but the following month a contract was signed to use it to supply peak power. This required a reconfiguration to allow full load to be reached more quickly, and redundancy for a third of the workforce. It was then run in an open-cycle mode, halving operating costs, with the option of switching to combined-cycle mode after an hour. The plant ceased generation on 31 March 2019 and closed on 10 May 2019 with demolition proposed to commence in summer 2019. It was observed that demolition was well underway by July 2019 and by September 2019, the grey steel chimney had been removed, thus a previously well-defined landmark had disappeared.

Specification

It was a CCGT-type power station. There was one 160 MWe

Siemens Siemens AG ( ) is a German multinational conglomerate corporation and the largest industrial manufacturing company in Europe headquartered in Munich with branch offices abroad. The principal divisions of the corporation are ''Industry'', '' ...

br>V94.2

gas turbine A gas turbine, also called a combustion turbine, is a type of continuous flow internal combustion engine. The main parts common to all gas turbine engines form the power-producing part (known as the gas generator or core) and are, in the directi ...

(built by

Ansaldo Energia Ansaldo Energia S.p.A. is an Italian power engineering company. It is based in Genoa, Italy. The absorbed parent company, Gio. Ansaldo & C., started in 1853. It was taken over by Leonardo S.p.A. In 2011, Leonardo S.p.A. sold 45% stake in Ansa ...

Genoa Genoa ( ; it, Genova ; lij, Zêna ). is the capital of the Italian region of Liguria and the List of cities in Italy, sixth-largest city in Italy. In 2015, 594,733 people lived within the city's administrative limits. As of the 2011 Italian ce ...

and now called th
SGT5-2000E
that fed exhaust gas at 544 °C to a

heat recovery steam generator A heat recovery steam generator (''HRSG'') is an energy recovery heat exchanger that recovers heat from a hot gas stream, such as a combustion turbine or other waste gas stream. It produces steam that can be used in a process (cogeneration) or u ...

. Steam from this entered a 75 MWe

steam turbine A steam turbine is a machine that extracts thermal energy from pressurized steam and uses it to do mechanical work on a rotating output shaft. Its modern manifestation was invented by Charles Parsons in 1884. Fabrication of a modern steam turbin ...

running, like the gas turbine, at 3000

rpm Revolutions per minute (abbreviated rpm, RPM, rev/min, r/min, or with the notation min−1) is a unit of rotational speed or rotational frequency for rotating machines. Standards ISO 80000-3:2019 defines a unit of rotation as the dimensionl ...

. Exhaust steam was passed through an air-cooled condenser and returned to the system as de-aerated

feedwater Boiler feedwater is an essential part of boiler operations. The feed water is put into the steam drum from a feed pump. In the steam drum the feed water is then turned into steam from the heat. After the steam is used it is then dumped to the ma ...

for the HRSG. It connected to the

Western Power Distribution Western Power Distribution was the trading identity of four electricity distribution companies in the United Kingdom: WPD South West (operating in South West England), WPD South Wales (in South Wales) and WPD Midlands (two companies, in the E ...

section of the National Grid via a substation at 132 kV. The

generator Generator may refer to: * Signal generator, electronic devices that generate repeating or non-repeating electronic signals * Electric generator, a device that converts mechanical energy to electrical energy. * Generator (circuit theory), an eleme ...

on the gas turbine was rated at 180 MVA and had a terminal voltage of 15 kV; the steam turbine's was 11 kV. The plant was 44% thermally efficient. The chimney was 60 m high.

References

External links

Centrica Energy

{{Energy in Wales Buildings and structures in Barry, Vale of Glamorgan Natural gas-fired power stations in Wales