Little Barford CCGT 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 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. 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 650 psi 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. The siding was extant in 2008 but had been removed by 2016. In 1961 the oldest generating set was 20 years 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 2.5 million gallons per hour. The output in GWh over the period 1961-82 was as follows.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. 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 at a pressure of 900 psi and 482°C. Cooling was by cooling towers. In 1961 the oldest generating set was 2 years old 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.
CCGT site history
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 plc 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 Ltd which uses polysulfide bromideflow 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 site was originally built by EGT, Atlantic Projects and Henry Boot, and went through a major upgrade in 2012
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
