A fire at the Didcot B gas-fired power plant in England has reduced the facility's output capacity by a half, further diminishing the country's reserve margins.
The blaze broke out on the evening of Sunday 19th October in one of the two cooling tower banks at the 1.4 GW power plant near Oxford, owned by RWE. The module supplies cooling water to one of the two generating units at Didcot B. The cooling towers are heat exchangers of the forced draught kind arranged in banks of steel and wooden construction with wood packing. Three of the towers were destroyed by the fire.
This is RWE's second fire at a UK plant in two years. In 2012 a fire broke out in a store containing about 4000 tonnes of wood pellets at its Tilbury biomass plant in Essex.
The cause of the Didcot fire has not yet been officially identified, but is under investigation. It is the third fire this year to break out at a UK power plant. The incidents have eroded reserve margins in the UK and have been exacerbated by outages at four nuclear reactors in the UK owned by EDF Energy.
It emerged last week that the four reactors would only be operating at three-quarters of their capacity when they return to service by the end of this year.
The four reactors at Heysham and Hartlepool were closed in August after EDF discovered a crack in a boiler spine in one unit. The closures followed fires and subsequent closures this year at two other power plants, E.On's Ironbridge inFebruary and SSE's Ferrybridge in July, and prompted National Grid to issue a tender for additional balancing reserve services to ensure that demand can be met over the winter period.
The Department for Energy and Climate Change said in a statement that the fire at Didcot B had not put electricity supplies at risk.
RWE said that the parts of the Didcot B site affected by the fire would remain non-operational until an investigation and repairs are completed. "It is too early to give any definitive estimate of how long this will be," it said.
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