Barry Power Station was a 230 MWe gas-fired powe
station
on Sully Moors Road in Sully in the

Vale of Glamorgan The Vale of Glamorgan ( ), locally referred to as ''The Vale'', is a Principal areas of Wales, county borough in the South East Wales, south-east of Wales. It borders Bridgend County Borough to the west, Cardiff to the east, Rhondda Cynon Taf t ...

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 ...

. It was eight miles west of

Cardiff Cardiff (; ) is the capital city, capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of Wales. Cardiff had a population of in and forms a Principal areas of Wales, principal area officially known as the City and County of Ca ...

and was situated next to a large

Ineos Ineos Group Limited is a British multinational conglomerate headquartered and registered in London. it was the fourth largest chemical company in the world, with additional operations in fuel, packaging and food, construction, automotive, ph ...

Vinyls chemicals works that makes

PVC Polyvinyl chloride (alternatively: poly(vinyl chloride), colloquial: vinyl or polyvinyl; abbreviated: PVC) is the world's third-most widely produced synthetic polymer of plastic (after polyethylene and polypropylene). About 40 million tons o ...

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 The AES Corporation is an American utility and power generation company. It owns and operates power plants, which it uses to generate and sell electricity to end users and intermediaries like utilities and industrial facilities. AES, headquarte ...

but trading as AES Barry Ltd. Until 2000 it ran as a base load station. It was bought by

Centrica Centrica plc is a British  multinational energy and services company with its headquarters in Windsor, Berkshire, England. It is the largest supplier of gas to domestic customers in the United Kingdom, and one of the largest suppliers ...

on 24 July 2003 for £39.7m. AES sold the plant because of the low price of electricity at that time. 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. This required a reconfiguration to allow full load to be reached more quickly, and redundancy for a third of the workforce. It was then run in an open-cycle mode, halving operating costs, with the option of switching to combined-cycle mode after an hour. The plant ceased generation on 31 March 2019 and closed on 10 May 2019 with demolition proposed to commence in summer 2019. 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 Siemens AG ( ) is a German multinational technology conglomerate. It is focused on industrial automation, building automation, rail transport and health technology. Siemens is the largest engineering company in Europe, and holds the positi ...

br>V94.2

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 ...

(built by

Ansaldo Energia Ansaldo Energia S.p.A. is an Italian power engineering company based in Genoa, Italy. The original parent company, Gio. Ansaldo & C., was founded in 1853, and merged with Finmeccanica in 1993 (now Leonardo S.p.A.). In 2024, the company's sha ...

Genoa Genoa ( ; ; ) is a city in and the capital of the Italian region of Liguria, and the sixth-largest city in Italy. As of 2025, 563,947 people live within the city's administrative limits. While its metropolitan city has 818,651 inhabitan ...

and now called th
SGT5-2000E
that fed exhaust gas at 544 °C to a

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 ...

. Steam from this entered a 75 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 ...

running, like the gas turbine, at 3000

rpm Revolutions per minute (abbreviated rpm, RPM, rev/min, r/min, or r⋅min−1) is a unit of rotational speed (or rotational frequency) for rotating machines. One revolution per minute is equivalent to hertz. Standards ISO 80000-3:2019 def ...

. Exhaust steam was passed through an air-cooled condenser and returned to the system as de-aerated

feedwater Boiler feedwater is the water which is supplied to a boiler. The feed water is put into the steam drum from a feed pump. In the steam drum the feed water is then turned into steam from the heat. After the steam is used, it is then dumped to the ...

for the HRSG. It connected to the

Western Power Distribution Western Power Distribution is a trade name formerly used by four electricity distribution companies in the United Kingdom: WPD South West (operating in South West England), WPD South Wales (in South Wales) and WPD Midlands (two companies, in t ...

section of the National Grid via a

substation A substation is a part of an electrical Electricity generation, generation, electric power transmission, transmission, and electric power distribution, distribution system. Substations transform voltage from high to low, or the reverse, or pe ...

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

{{Energy in Wales Buildings and structures in Barry, Vale of Glamorgan Natural gas-fired power stations in Wales