Little Barford Power Station
Little Barford Power Station is a combined cycle gas turbine power station in the parish of Little Barford in Bedfordshire, England. It lies just south of the A428 St Neots bypass and east of the Wyboston 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.
The net capacity of 727 MW is sufficient to supply over half a million households.
History
Little Barford combined cycle gas turbine power station was built on the site of two former coal-fired power stations 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 126MW and comprised four 31.5MW English Electric generators. The boilers — two International Combustion and two Stirling — burned pulverised coal and produced steam at a rate of 1,200,000 lb/hr at a pressure of and. 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. The siding was extant in 2008 but had been removed by 2016. In 1961, the oldest generating set was 20years old 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 per hour.The output in GWh over the period 19461982 was as follows.
Little Barford B
Little Barford B station was a 120 MW station constructed by the Central Electricity Generating Board. It contained two x 60MW C. A. Parsons turbo alternators. Each set was supplied from a Foster Wheeler boiler burning pulverised coal and produced steam at a rate of 550,000 lb/hr at a pressure of and. Cooling was by an additional cooling towers. Unit 1 was commissioned in March 1959 followed by unit 2 in October 1959. In 1961 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 60MW units. The automatic electronic boiler control system used online computers and process controllers, the first in the UK.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, became Innogy in August 2000. That company was bought by the German electricity company, Essen-based RWE in March 2002, and became RWE npower. The station is now owned and operated by RWE Generation UK.In 2002, a 12MWe electrical storage facility was built by Regenesys Technologies which uses polysulfide bromide flow batteries. 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 station underwent an upgrade in 2012.