EDF has agreed to sell its West Burton B combined-cycle gas turbine (CCGT) power station to investment firm EIG for an undisclosed sum.
The deal also includes a 49MW battery system at the site in Nottinghamshire.
West Burton B is EDF’s only gas-fired power station in the UK and comprises three CCGT units with a total capacity of around 1.3GW, all of which hold Capacity Market agreements out to 2024/25.
Subject to regulatory approval, the parties are aiming to complete the transaction as early as possible within 2021. The 60 staff operating the plant will all be transferred to the new owner.
The deal comes shortly after EDF announced plans to cease generation at West Burton A – its last remaining coal plant – in September 2022 after all four of its units failed to secure Capacity Market agreements for next winter in the latest T-1 auction in March.
The company said the sale of West Burton B will mark its complete departure from fossil fuel generation in the UK, leaving it to instead focus on nuclear power and renewables.
Uncertainty remains over Dungeness B
EDF has also issued an update on its Dungeness B nuclear power station, which has been offline since September 2018 and is currently forecast to return to service in August 2021. The company said in a statement that the station has “a number of unique, significant and ongoing technical challenges that continue to make the future both difficult and uncertain.”
“Many of these issues can be explained by the fact that Dungeness was designed in the 1960s as a prototype and suffered from very challenging construction and commissioning delays,” the statement added.
“Major investments have been made to repair and upgrade the station over many years, including more than £100 million in this current outage. A number of significant technical risks still remain.”
It continued: “The current scheduled decommissioning date is 2028. Given the unique technical challenges noted above, a range of scenarios are being actively explored.
“These include moving directly into the defuelling phase later this year – if return to service cannot be achieved – bringing forward the end of generation date, or continuing until the scheduled date of 2028. Any change in closure date will be driven by the technical conditions and ensuring we continue to maintain safety over the entire lifecycle of Dungeness.”
EDF said it expects to have gathered the technical information required to make a decision in the next few months, adding that it is “important we bring clarity to the more than 800 people that work at the station, and who support it from other locations, as well as to government and all those with a stake in the station’s future.”
Over the last year, the company has announced it will stop generating power its Hunterston B and Hinkley Point B nuclear power stations by January 2022 and July 2022 respectively.