Deeside Power Station is a power station on the Deeside Industrial Park to the north of

Connah's Quay Connah's Quay (), known locally as "The Quay" and formerly known as Wepre, is a town and community in Flintshire, on the River Dee and next to the border with England. With a population of 16,771, it is the largest town in Flintshire. The ...

Flintshire Flintshire () is a county in the north-east of Wales. It borders the Irish Sea to the north, the Dee Estuary to the north-east, the English county of Cheshire to the east, Wrexham County Borough to the south, and Denbighshire to the west. ...

Wales Wales ( ) is a Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. It is bordered by the Irish Sea to the north and west, England to the England–Wales border, east, the Bristol Channel to the south, and the Celtic ...

. Constructed as a 498 MWe combined-cycle gas plant, it is now used to provide

inertial response Inertial response is a property of large synchronous generators, which contain large synchronous rotating masses, and which acts to overcome any immediate imbalance between power supply and demand for electric power systems, typically the electric ...

and reactive power services to the grid. It is a mile from the 1,420 MW Connah's Quay Power Station, owned by

Uniper Uniper SE is a German multinational energy company based in Düsseldorf, Germany, which has been a state-owned enterprise since late 2022. It is one of the biggest energy companies by revenue in Europe. The name of the company is a portmanteau o ...

. The power stations are separated by the

Flintshire Bridge The Flintshire Bridge is a cable-stayed bridge spanning the Dee Estuary in North Wales. The bridge links Flint and Connah's Quay to the shore north of the River Dee at the southern end of the Wirral Peninsula. The bridge cost £55 million to c ...

History

Deeside power station is sited on land of a former

British Steel Corporation British may refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * British people, nationals or natives of the United Kingdom, British Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies. * British national identity, the characteristics of British people and cultur ...

steelworks, and was commissioned in November 1994, costing £200 million. Built by

Alstom Alstom SA () is a French multinational rolling stock manufacturer which operates worldwide in rail transport markets. It is active in the fields of passenger transportation, signaling, and locomotives, producing high-speed, suburban, regional ...

for

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 ...

, it is now owned by Triton Power. In April 2002, 250 MW of capacity at the plant was mothballed when the price of electricity dropped. The station resumed full power in October 2003. In March 2018, the plant was again mothballed, and in January 2020 it was awarded a contract to supply the National Grid with

and reactive power services. Work to repurpose the turbines began in March 2020, with specialist new turbine blocks installed, and the modified plant entered service in 2021. It is believed to be the first conversion of a gas power station to provide standalone grid stability services. In 2022, part of the building, which housed the Heat Recovery Steam Generator, needed to be deconstructed as part of the power station's transition from a Combined Cycle Gas Turbine (CCGT) configuration to an Open Cycle Gas Turbine (OCGT) configuration.

Original specification

Deeside was constructed as CCGT-type power station running on natural gas. There were two 166 MWe Alstom GT13E2

gas turbine A gas turbine or gas turbine engine is a type of Internal combustion engine#Continuous combustion, continuous flow internal combustion engine. The main parts common to all gas turbine engines form the power-producing part (known as the gas gene ...

s, from which the exhaust gas at 525 °C enters two

heat recovery steam generator A heat recovery steam generator (HRSG) is a 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 used to drive a steam ...

s. The steam from these powered one 176 MWe

steam turbine A steam turbine or steam turbine engine is a machine or heat engine that extracts thermal energy from pressurized steam and uses it to do mechanical work utilising a rotating output shaft. Its modern manifestation was invented by Sir Charles Par ...

. The terminal voltage on the

ABB ABB Group is a Swedish-Swiss multinational electrical engineering corporation. Incorporated in Switzerland as ABB Ltd., and headquartered in Zurich, it is dual-listed on the Nasdaq Nordic exchange in Stockholm, Sweden, and the SIX Swiss Excha ...

generators was 16 kV, and this electricity entered the National Grid, via a

transformer In electrical engineering, a transformer is a passive component that transfers electrical energy from one electrical circuit to another circuit, or multiple Electrical network, circuits. A varying current in any coil of the transformer produces ...

, at 400 kV. It had a

thermal efficiency In thermodynamics, the thermal efficiency (\eta_) is a dimensionless performance measure of a device that uses thermal energy, such as an internal combustion engine, steam turbine, steam engine, boiler, furnace, refrigerator, ACs etc. For ...

of 53%. Cooling water for the condenser was taken from the River Dee. The

cooling tower A cooling tower is a device that rejects waste heat to the atmosphere through the cooling of a coolant stream, usually a water stream, to a lower temperature. Cooling towers may either use the evaporation of water to remove heat and cool the ...

s were made b
Balcke Duerr
of

Ratingen Ratingen (; ) is a town in the district of Mettmann in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It lies in the northwestern part of Berg about 12 km northeast of Düsseldorf. Administration With a communal reform of 1975 the independent municipalit ...

, Germany. The plant has two chimneys.

In popular culture

The power station can be seen in episode 1 of the BBC's drama series '' In the Flesh''.

References

External links

{{Energy in Wales Natural gas-fired power stations in Wales Buildings and structures in Flintshire