Little Barford Power Station is a
gas-fired
Natural gas (also called fossil gas or simply gas) is a naturally occurring mixture of gaseous hydrocarbons consisting primarily of methane in addition to various smaller amounts of other higher alkanes. Low levels of trace gases like carbon di ...
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 ...
just north of the village of
Little Barford
Little Barford is a hamlet and civil parish in the Borough of Bedford in Bedfordshire, England about northeast of the county town of Bedford.
The 2011 census combines other data for Little Barford with Wyboston, Chawston and Colesden civil par ...
(close to
St Neots) in
Bedfordshire
Bedfordshire (; abbreviated Beds) is a ceremonial county in the East of England. The county has been administered by three unitary authorities, Borough of Bedford, Central Bedfordshire and Borough of Luton, since Bedfordshire County Council ...
, England. It lies just south of the
A428
The A428 road is a major road in central and eastern England. It runs between the cities of Coventry and Cambridge by way of the county towns of Northampton and Bedford. Together with the A421, (and the A43, M40 and the A34), the eastern se ...
St Neots bypass and east of the
Wyboston
Wyboston is a village in the English county of Bedfordshire,adjacent to the town of St Neots, on the Cambridgeshire border. The eastern part of the village is dominated by the A1 Great North Road. Approaching the Black Cat Roundabout from the B ...
Leisure Park. The
River Great Ouse runs alongside. It was formerly the site of two coal-fired power stations, now demolished. The station is operated by
RWE
RWE AG is a German multinational energy company headquartered in Essen. It generates and trades electricity in Asia-Pacific, Europe and the United States. The company is Europe's most climate threatening Company, the world's number two in offsh ...
.
The net capacity of 727 MW is sufficient to supply over half a million households.
History
Little Barford CCGT power station was built on the site of two former
coal-fired power stations
A coal-fired power station or coal power plant is a thermal power station which burns coal to generate electricity. Worldwide, there are about 8,500 coal-fired power stations totaling over 2,000 gigawatts capacity. They generate about a th ...
opened in 1939 and 1959 that had a generating capacity of 126 and 127 MW.
Little Barford A
Little Barford A station was built and operated by the Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire Electricity Company. It was authorised in June 1938 and commissioned in 1941. It had an installed capacity of 126 MW and comprised 4 × 31.5 MW
English Electric generators.
[''CEGB Statistical Yearbook'' (various dates). CEGB, London.] The boilers — two International Combustion and two Stirling
— burned
pulverised coal and produced steam at a rate of 1,200,000 lb/hr (151.2 kg/s) at a pressure of 650
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 ...
(44.83
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 482 °C.
The station was adjacent to the
East Coast Main Line railway, coal was delivered and ash was removed via sidings and a connection with the railway (at 49 miles & 69
chains
A chain is a serial assembly of connected pieces, called links, typically made of metal, with an overall character similar to that of a rope in that it is flexible and curved in compression but linear, rigid, and load-bearing in tension. A c ...
from London Kings Cross). The siding was extant in 2008 but had been removed by 2016. In 1961 the oldest generating set was 20 years old (commissioned in 1941) and the thermal efficiency of the station was 22.63 per cent.
Water for condensing was abstracted from the River Ouse and was supplemented with a cooling tower with a capacity of 2.5 million gallons per hour.
The output in GWh over the period 1946-82 was as follows.
[CEGB ''Annual Report and Accounts'', various years]The A station was closed on 26 October 1981.
Little Barford B
Construction of Little Barford B station started in 1959 by the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB). It had an installed capacity of 127 MW and comprised 2 × 63.5 MW
C.A. Parsons generators. The Foster Wheeler boilers
burned pulverised coal and produced steam at a rate of 1,100,000 lb/hr (138.6 kg/s) at a pressure of 900 psi (62.1 bar) and 482 °C.
Cooling was by cooling towers. In 1961 the oldest generating set was 2 years old (commissioned in 1959) and the thermal efficiency of the station was 28.96 per cent.
The output in GWh over the period 1961-84 was as follows.
The station had completely remote operation of the two 60 MW units. The automatic electronic boiler control system used online computers and process controllers, the first in the UK.
Demolition of both stations took place in 1989, an event covered by the children's TV programme ''
Blue Peter''. Two and one tall chimneys and two high cooling towers were blown up.
The two Parsons turbo-alternators of the B station were shipped to Malta. One was recommissioned as Unit 8 at Marsa Power Station and remained in service until 15 February 2015.
Little Barford CCGT
Construction of the gas-fired station started in 1994, and it opened in 1996. The company that built it,
Swindon-based
National Power
National power is defined as the sum of all resources available to a nation in the pursuit of national objectives. Assessing the national power of political entities was already a matter of relevance during the classical antiquity, the middle ages ...
, became Innogy plc in August 2000. That company was bought by the German electricity company,
Essen-based
RWE
RWE AG is a German multinational energy company headquartered in Essen. It generates and trades electricity in Asia-Pacific, Europe and the United States. The company is Europe's most climate threatening Company, the world's number two in offsh ...
in March 2002, and became
RWE npower
Npower Limited is a British supplier of gas and electricity to businesses. It has been a subsidiary of E.ON UK since January 2019. The company was formerly known as Innogy plc and was listed on the London Stock Exchange and was a constituent ...
. The station is now owned and operated by RWE Generation UK.
In 2002, a 12MWe electrical storage facility was built by Regenesys Technologies Ltd (previously owned by Innogy plc but bought by VRB Power Systems in October 2004) which uses
polysulfide bromide flow batteries
A flow battery, or redox flow battery (after reduction–oxidation), is a type of electrochemical cell where chemical energy is provided by two chemical components Solution (chemistry), dissolved in liquids that are pumped through the system on ...
. However, the facility was never operated commercially due to engineering issues in scaling up the technology.
In 2019, the failure of the plant was partially responsible for a large scale nationwide power cut on the evening of 9 August, after lightning hit a transmission line.
The station was constructed as a turn-key project awarded to GEC Alsthom with principal equipment supplied by various GEC Alstom divisions including the gas turbine, LP steam turbine, steam boilers, electrical generator and transformers. Civil engineering and building was sub-contracted to Henry Boot. The GEC Alsthom Site Manager was Mike Snudden. The station underwent an upgrade in 2012.
Original specification
The site is a
Combined Cycle Gas Turbine
A combined cycle power plant is an assembly of heat engines that work in tandem from the same source of heat, converting it into mechanical energy. On land, when used to make electricity the most common type is called a combined cycle gas turb ...
(CCGT) power station using natural gas. It originally had two
General Electric
General Electric Company (GE) is an American multinational conglomerate founded in 1892, and incorporated in New York state and headquartered in Boston. The company operated in sectors including healthcare, aviation, power, renewable en ...
Frame 9F
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 directio ...
engines each producing 220 MWe. Each of these had a Stein Industry
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 us ...
which lead to one
steam turbine produced by
Alstom which produced 256MWe.
Upgraded specification
In 2012, the plant was upgraded to General Electric Frame 9FA+e gas turbine engines each producing 241 MWe. They are still connected to the original heat recovery steam generator which led to the steam turbine produced by Alstom which now produces 265 MWe.
References
External links
Other CCGTs in eastern England
{{RWE
Buildings and structures in Bedfordshire
Natural gas-fired power stations in England
Power stations in the East of England
Demolished power stations in the United Kingdom
Former power stations in England
Coal-fired power stations in England
RWE