Kincardine power station was a 760 MW

coal-fired Coal is a combustible black or brownish-black sedimentary rock, formed as rock strata called coal seams. Coal is mostly carbon with variable amounts of other elements, chiefly hydrogen, sulfur, oxygen, and nitrogen. Coal is formed when dea ...

power station A power station, also referred to as a power plant and sometimes generating station or generating plant, is an industrial facility for the generation of electric power. Power stations are generally connected to an electrical grid. Many p ...

on the shores of the upper

Firth of Forth The Firth of Forth () is the estuary, or firth, of several Scottish rivers including the River Forth. It meets the North Sea with Fife on the north coast and Lothian on the south. Name ''Firth'' is a cognate of ''fjord'', a Norse word meani ...

Kincardine on Forth Kincardine ( ; gd, Cinn Chàrdainn) or Kincardine-on-Forth is a small town on the north shore of the Firth of Forth, in Fife, Scotland. The town was given the status of a burgh of barony in 1663. It was at one time a reasonably prosperous mi ...

Fife Fife (, ; gd, Fìobha, ; sco, Fife) is a council area, historic county, registration county and lieutenancy area of Scotland. It is situated between the Firth of Tay and the Firth of Forth, with inland boundaries with Perth and Kinross (i ...

Scotland Scotland (, ) is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Covering the northern third of the island of Great Britain, mainland Scotland has a border with England to the southeast and is otherwise surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean to the ...

History

The station began construction in 1952 and started generating electricity in 1958. At the time of its opening it was the largest power station in Scotland. It was initially operated by the

South of Scotland Electricity Board The South of Scotland Electricity Board (SSEB) generated, transmitted and distributed electricity throughout the south of Scotland, including the former regions of Strathclyde, Lothian, Fife, Central, Borders and Dumfries and Galloway and a few t ...

(SSEB). The station was constructed to take advantage of post-WW2 expansion of the

and

Lothian Lothian (; sco, Lowden, Loudan, -en, -o(u)n; gd, Lodainn ) is a region of the Scottish Lowlands, lying between the southern shore of the Firth of Forth and the Lammermuir Hills and the Moorfoot Hills. The principal settlement is the Sco ...

coalfields. Coal was supplied by

Merry-go-round train A merry-go-round train, often abbreviated to MGR, is a block train of hopper wagons which both loads and unloads its cargo while moving. In the United Kingdom, they are most commonly coal trains delivering to power stations. These trains were ...

s. It was capable of generating 760 MW peak load, and when commissioned could produce up to one third of Scotland's total electricity needs.

Specification

Kincardine power station had one of the first 120 MW

turbo-alternator An alternator is an electrical generator that converts mechanical energy to electrical energy in the form of alternating current. For reasons of cost and simplicity, most alternators use a rotating magnetic field with a stationary armature.Gor ...

units in the UK (the first to be commissioned was at Blyth A). The first set at Kincardine was commissioned on 28 December 1958. The steam conditions at the turbine stop valve were 1,500

psi Psi, PSI or Ψ may refer to: Alphabetic letters * Psi (Greek) (Ψ, ψ), the 23rd letter of the Greek alphabet * Psi (Cyrillic) (Ѱ, ѱ), letter of the early Cyrillic alphabet, adopted from Greek Arts and entertainment * "Psi" as an abbreviatio ...

and 1,000 °F with reheat to 1,000 °F (103.4

bar Bar or BAR may refer to: Food and drink * Bar (establishment), selling alcoholic beverages * Candy bar * Chocolate bar Science and technology * Bar (river morphology), a deposit of sediment * Bar (tropical cyclone), a layer of cloud * Bar (u ...

and 538 °C). An even more advanced 200 MW set was installed at Kincardine in the 1962. This included boilers rated at 1,350,000 lb/h (170.1 kg/s) capacity delivering steam at 2,350 psi and 1,050 °F (162 bar and 566 °C) with reheat to 1,000 °F. The boilers were by John Brown Land Boilers Limited. The architect was Robert Matthew and the consulting engineers were Kennedy and Donkin.

Operations

The station was formally opened by the Queen in October 1960. The station had cost £36,250,000, about £4M less than had been estimated in 1955. Upon opening it had three 120 MW units, 200 MW units were added in 1962 and 1963. Water for the steam condensers was abstracted from and returned to the Forth. When fully commissioned the station drew 1,025 cubic feet per second (29.02 m³/s) of cooling water. There were concerns about the re-circulation of discharged warm water back into the intake. The topography of the river was modelled which demonstrated that re-circulation would not be significant and the length of the culvert could be reduced. Ash from the boilers was used to reclaim land from the estuary held behind a 9,000 ft (2743 m) embankment. Early in the operational life of the station it was found that aluminium brass condenser tubes were failing through

corrosion Corrosion is a natural process that converts a refined metal into a more chemically stable oxide. It is the gradual deterioration of materials (usually a metal) by chemical or electrochemical reaction with their environment. Corrosion engine ...

. Research indicated the absence of a protective iron oxide film on the condenser tubes at Kincardine. A program to inject

ferrous sulphate Iron(II) sulfate (British English: iron(II) sulphate) or ferrous sulfate denotes a range of salts with the formula Fe SO4·''x''H2O. These compounds exist most commonly as the heptahydrate (''x'' = 7) but several values for x are know ...

into the cooling water was instigated to provide iron to aid the formation of an oxide film. Semi-automatic start up, loading and shutdown of generating sets was introduced at Kincardine in June 1966. This was associated with the change in the operation of the station from base load to two-shift working. This was the first time that such control has been used in the UK. The rail facilities at Kincardine included five coal discharge filler pits including two tipplers, 8 railway sidings, an oil discharge facility, and a loco shed. These facilities were extant in 1996 but had been removed by 2007. Operation of the station ceased in 1997, and the facility had been demolished by 2001.

Redevelopment

A 275 kV substation still occupies part of the site, this has 275 kV high voltage connections to/from Currie, Fetteresso, Grangemouth, Longannet and Tealing substations. The northern approach to the new

Clackmannanshire Bridge The Clackmannanshire Bridge is a road bridge over the Firth of Forth in Scotland which opened to traffic on 19 November 2008. Prior to 1 October 2008 the bridge was referred to as the upper Forth crossing while the name was chosen. Background ...

built across the

and completed in late 2008 cuts across the extreme west end of the site. The site was used for the storage of a large quantity of track materials for the rebuilding of the Stirling-Alloa-Kincardine rail link, which is now operating, and is currently being used as a coal unloading and stockpiling area. This facility was latterly owned by the privatised

Scottish Power Scottish Power is a vertically integrated energy company based in Glasgow, Scotland. It is a subsidiary of Spanish utility firm Iberdrola. ScottishPower is the distribution network operator for Central and Southern Scotland, Merseyside, Nor ...

utility group.

References

External links