Report - Littlebrook D Power Station, Kent - May 2015

[clebby]

Littlebrook D Power Station, Kent.

Visited with huey. Props to @GAJ for providing the dope on this one.

Some history for those who care:

Littlebrook D was an oil-fired power station and was built by the nationalised Central Electricity Generating Board. Construction began in 1976, with the commissioning of the first unit was underway by 1981. The 1980s still saw a potential threat from the Cold War, and as such the CEGB designed Littlebrook D as a robust station with high plant redundancy, meaning that the station would form a pivotal role should disaster have struck the city of London. At this time, London was still dependent on several smaller generating stations within the city itself. Due to the flexibility of the oil-fired boilers, a cold unit could be synchronised onto the grid within 4 hours and the increased ability to rapidly increase or decrease load forms a significant part of what made the station attractive on a commercial basis. Five 110,000-tonne fuel oil storage tanks were used to store the heavy fuel oil for the main units, and this fuel was delivered to the site by tankers mooring at one of the site's two jetties on the River Thames.

The stations total generating capacity of 1,475 MW was sufficient to meet the needs of over 2 million people. Unit 3 was held in "long term reserve" for a number of years, mainly due to the wear and tear the boiler experienced during the UK miners strike of 1984-85, during which oil-fired stations were run aggressively while the base load coal stations were struggling to obtain fuel. During this strike all three units operated simultaneously and continuously throughout with the exception of a short repair period to Unit 3's boiler, thereby exceeding its original design intent. This resulted in an annual generation of circa 1800 GW which may be the unofficial record for the CEGB's 2000MW class of power station.

The station formed a critical strategic component to the UK grid system. The site was one of a number of stations throughout the UK with black-start capabilities, meaning that it was able to start generating without an external power supply - the station would be one of the first to start generating should the UK ever experience a partial or complete blackout. Littlebrook D played a vital role in restoring power supplies to the South East of England in the days following the storm force winds of October 1987. The black-start capability was facilitated by the presence of three open-cycle gas turbines, each capable of generating 35 MW, which is sufficient to operate the station auxiliary equipment and allow a main unit to be started. Each OCGT set incorporates two Rolls-Royce Olympus jet engines which are industrial derivatives of those that were used on the Concorde aircraft. As well as providing black-start supplies to the station, the fact that they can synchronise and ramp up to full load in under five minutes means they are used to generate at the request of the National Grid to deal with short-term peaks in demand.

After privatisation in 1991, the station was owned by National Power, and later by its subdivision Innogy. The station is currently owned by the German utility company, RWE, who made the decision that Littlebrook D would "opt-out" of the Large Combustion Plant Directive, an EU directive aiming to deal with air pollutants created by the combustion of fossil fuels. As such, the station closed its main units on March 31st 2015.

I'm sure you'll be pleased to know that I won't be whinging about wanting to see Grain and Kingsnorth anymore, as I'm afraid they are no longer with us. Nul points! Anyhow, Littlebrook was another one that I've been lusting after for a while, and as it supposedly closed back in March we were expecting it to be a little bit less sketchy than it was when everyone else did it.

As usual we were wrong. As it happens, the closure date only referred to the main units; the three gas-fired units are still very much alive, there's a team of engineers in-house to support them, and pretty much every pump or fan is running. This, multiplied with he high court injunction, makes it fairly prangy inside and rendered the control room a definitive no-no. It also meant our entrance was a bit of a goat fuck, although this seems to be a bit of a theme whenever huey is involved..

Here's some photos. I believe the saying goes 'you can't polish a turd', so I haven't tried.

GEC epic:

We were in a bit of a hurry, and so I'm afraid I didn't take any edgy selfies for scale like I normally do, but the turbines really are vast.

Poor unit 3

Cranes a bit of a beast as well:

I'm actually posting in reverse order as we saw the interesting stuff last.

Feedwater heater (I think) - this was used to pre-heat the water delivered to the boiler to reduce the irreversibilities involved in steam generation and thus improve the thermodynamic efficiency of the system, as well as to limit the thermal shock to the boiler.

Moving into the very upper reaches of the boiler house:

Fun fact: during construction, on 9th January 1978, the safety gear on a passenger and materials hoist failed and the hoist cage fell 30m to the bottom of a 60m shaft. Four men died and another five received serious injuries. Indeed, from what I can find at least nine people died during the stations construction - pretty unthinkable when you consider it wasn't actually built that long ago.

At the bottom of these pipes some sort of extremely loud compressor was running, and every 5 minutes or so an almighty whooosh would rebound around the station as it discharged, was quite impressive.

The burner floor for boiler no. 3:

And I'll finish with something interesting - this was the first glimpse we got of a distant turbine hall from the safety of the boiler house.

​

 

[GAJ]

Good stuff dude & glad you got in & out safely! It's definitely more live than you could ever make out from beyond the fence so you did well getting around so much of it.

Shame about Kingsnorth & Grain but they made their intentions pretty clear with those sites so they weren't going to become another Battersea. At least you've nailed some good ones anyway.

Well done mate

 

[Ojay]

WIN, and them GEC's were always worth a look in

 

[m9]

yeeeeaaahhhhhhh buddy!

 

[host]

Win Win Win….

 

[ACID- REFLUX]

Top Trumps well done

 

[merryprankster]

nicely done gents

 

[drhowser]

Good to know this should still be here whenever I'm back next. Definitely unfinished business here..
Also, 9th Jan 1978. My birthday to the day.

 

[The_Raw]

I can't wait to bump into you again

 

[WhoDerpsWins]

Cracking stuff this Clebs!

 

[clebby]

Thanks all

At least you've nailed some good ones anyway.

Well done mate

Cheers man, and there's still Ironbridge, Longannet and Ferrybridge in the pipeline of course..

 

[huey]

Bloody hell mate, your pics came out so much better than mine. Another cracking report of an epic place, keep it up you old sausage jockey.