Barry Power Station

Operator(s)CentricaThermal power station Primary fuelNatural gasCombined cycle?YesPower generation Units operational1 x 160 MW
1 x 75 MWMake and modelSiemensNameplate capacity230 MWExternal linksCommonsRelated media on Commons

Barry Power Station was a 230 MWe gas-fired power station on Sully Moors Road in Sully in the Vale of Glamorgan, Wales. It was eight miles west of Cardiff and was situated next to a large Ineos 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 but trading as AES Barry Ltd. Until 2000 it ran as a base load station. It was bought by Centrica on 24 July 2003 for £39.7m. AES sold the plant because of the low price of electricity at that time.^{[citation needed]}

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.^[1] This required a reconfiguration to allow full load to be reached more quickly, and redundancy for a third of the workforce.^[1] It was then run in an open-cycle mode, halving operating costs, with the option of switching to combined-cycle mode after an hour.^[2] The plant ceased generation on 31 March 2019 and closed on 10 May 2019 with demolition proposed to commence in summer 2019.^{[citation needed]} 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 V94.2 gas turbine (built by Ansaldo Energia in Genoa and now called the SGT5-2000E) that fed exhaust gas at 544 °C to a heat recovery steam generator. Steam from this entered a 75 MWe steam turbine running, like the gas turbine, at 3000 rpm. Exhaust steam was passed through an air-cooled condenser and returned to the system as de-aerated feedwater for the HRSG. It connected to the Western Power Distribution section of the National Grid via a substation at 132 kV. The generator 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
• Centrica buys the power station