Greenwich Power Station is a standby gas and formerly oil and coal-fired

power station A power station, also referred to as a power plant and sometimes generating station or generating plant, is an industrial facility for the electricity generation, generation of electric power. Power stations are generally connected to an electr ...

by the

River Thames The River Thames ( ), known alternatively in parts as the The Isis, River Isis, is a river that flows through southern England including London. At , it is the longest river entirely in England and the Longest rivers of the United Kingdom, s ...

Greenwich Greenwich ( , , ) is an List of areas of London, area in south-east London, England, within the Ceremonial counties of England, ceremonial county of Greater London, east-south-east of Charing Cross. Greenwich is notable for its maritime hi ...

in south-east

London London is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of both England and the United Kingdom, with a population of in . London metropolitan area, Its wider metropolitan area is the largest in Wester ...

. Originally constructed to supply power for London's tram system, since 1988 it has been

London Underground The London Underground (also known simply as the Underground or as the Tube) is a rapid transit system serving Greater London and some parts of the adjacent home counties of Buckinghamshire, Essex and Hertfordshire in England. The Undergro ...

's central emergency power supply, providing power if there is partial or total loss of National Grid supplies.

History

The power station was constructed on the riverside site of a former tram depot operated by the London Tramways Company (and before that by the Pimlico Peckham & Greenwich Street Tramway Company, taken over in 1873). An act of Parliament, the London County Council (Tramways and Improvements) Act 1902 ( 2 Edw. 7. c. ccxix), empowered

London County Council The London County Council (LCC) was the principal local government body for the County of London throughout its existence from 1889 to 1965, and the first London-wide general municipal authority to be directly elected. It covered the area today ...

to construct new tramways, improve existing ones and to "erect maintain and use a station for generating and transforming electrical energy with all necessary engines dynamos plant and machinery." The station was designed by William Edward Riley, chief architect of the LCC architects department, and built in two sections between 1902 and 1910, to provide power for London County Council Tramways. The first section was formally opened on 26 May 1906 by Sir Evan Spicer, chairman of the county council. Surplus power was used by other electric tramways and the Underground Electric Railways Company of London. The station originally had a coal-fired boiler house, fuelled by coal craned from barges on the River Thames, and an engine room. This housed four John Musgrave and Sons compound reciprocating Corliss 'Manhattan'-type steam engines each driving 3,500 kW 6,600 volts at 25 hertz flywheel-type alternators.

The station is an early London example of a steel-framed building with a stone-clad brick cover. In area it measures by , with a maximum roof height of . It is divided into two

nave The nave () is the central part of a church, stretching from the (normally western) main entrance or rear wall, to the transepts, or in a church without transepts, to the chancel. When a church contains side aisles, as in a basilica-type ...

s: the west nave, originally the boiler house, is now the turbine hall; the east nave, now largely unused, was the former engine room. The external stock brick walls include Portland stone decorations, notably on the south and north elevations. Corrugated sheeting replaced the original slate roof. The coaling pier was designed by the LCC's chief engineer, Maurice Fitzmaurice. By 1910 the advantages of

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 ...

s were well known and four steam 5,000kW turbine alternators were installed in the second stage of the station's building programme. The reciprocating engines installed during the first stage were replaced by steam turbines in 1922. The two chimneys of stage one were high but, following objections from the nearby Royal Observatory (the station was immediately below the

Prime Meridian A prime meridian is an arbitrarily chosen meridian (geography), meridian (a line of longitude) in a geographic coordinate system at which longitude is defined to be 0°. On a spheroid, a prime meridian and its anti-meridian (the 180th meridian ...

and the meridian of the Altazimuth), the chimneys of stage two were reduced to height. The taller chimneys were eventually reduced to the height of the later chimneys during a modernisation programme between 1969 and 1972. The steam turbines were replaced by

Rolls-Royce Rolls-Royce (always hyphenated) may refer to: * Rolls-Royce Limited, a British manufacturer of cars and later aero engines, founded in 1906, now defunct Automobiles * Rolls-Royce Motor Cars, the current car manufacturing company incorporated in ...

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 ...

generators connected to Power Turbines from former Stal-Laval, Finspång, Sweden today named Siemens-Energy AB. These originally burned oil, but were later converted to burn oil and gas. The generators are still housed in what was formerly the boiler house. They have a total capacity of 117.6 megawatts (MW), generated at 11,000 volts. This voltage can be increased to 22,000 volts for connection to the London Underground electricity system. The gas turbines were originally introduced to supplement output from

's west London power station at Lots Road. When LU began to use National Grid power supplies in 1998 and Lots Road was subsequently decommissioned, Greenwich became LU's central emergency power supply and London's only original power station still in operation. Its six engines provide power if there is partial or total loss of National Grid supplies, enabling safe evacuation of passengers and staff from London's underground network. In 2015, TfL instigated a 20-year programme to install up to six new gas engines in Greenwich Power Station's Old Turbine Hall. They were envisaged as providing a steady source of reliable, low carbon power for the Tube as well as hot water and heating for nearby schools and homes. However, after local objections about increased air pollution, the proposal was withdrawn in December 2016 ‘to allow time for a review of the project to ensure it aligns with the priorities of the new Mayoral administration’. (During 2016, a combined heat and power (CHP) energy centre had been constructed on a nearby Greenwich Peninsula site to provide

district heating District heating (also known as heat networks) is a system for distributing heat generated in a centralized location through a system of insulated pipes for residential and commercial heating requirements such as space heater, space heating and w ...

to an eventual total of 15,700 properties.)

Operations

Coal Coal is a combustible black or brownish-black sedimentary rock, formed as rock strata called coal seams. Coal is mostly carbon with variable amounts of other Chemical element, elements, chiefly hydrogen, sulfur, oxygen, and nitrogen. Coal i ...

was delivered by barge to the large coal

jetty A jetty is a man-made structure that protrudes from land out into water. A jetty may serve as a breakwater (structure), breakwater, as a walkway, or both; or, in pairs, as a means of constricting a channel. The term derives from the French la ...

in the river, which stands on 16 Doric-styled,

cast iron Cast iron is a class of iron–carbon alloys with a carbon content of more than 2% and silicon content around 1–3%. Its usefulness derives from its relatively low melting temperature. The alloying elements determine the form in which its car ...

columns. From 1927, the coal was then conveyed to then white-painted storage bunkers constructed on the west side of the station (following remedial work in 2013, the bunkers were coloured black). After the transition to oil-fired operation, its cranes (previously also used for coal ash removal) were removed and the jetty was modified to allow fuel oil to be pumped ashore from river tankers. However, the pier is now disused as any oil used at the station comes by road tanker. In 2020, the turbines were switched on once per month on average for up to two hours, and TfL was reviewing the power station's future as emergency back-up power provider. In January 2021, a gas turbine generator contained in a unit on the ground floor was destroyed by fire.

In popular culture

Greenwich Power Station was a location used to accompany the track "Heartland" in '' Infected: The Movie'', a 1986 music video collection featuring The The. Almost 20 years later, the power station appeared in the music video for "The Importance of Being Idle", a song by the English rock band

Oasis In ecology, an oasis (; : oases ) is a fertile area of a desert or semi-desert environmentBuildings and structures in the Royal Borough of Greenwich Coal-fired power stations in England Former power stations in London London Underground infrastructure Natural gas-fired power stations in England Oil-fired power stations in England Port of London Power stations in London Power stations on the River Thames