The fire is understood to have broken out at around 14.00 BST in unit 4 of the coal plant where equipment was being fitted to make the plant compliant with EU air pollution standards, but also impacted unit 3 at the site.
“With coal plants being more profitable than gas currently, we would expect this to have an impact on SSE’s generation profitability in the coming months,” analysts at Citigroup said in an investor note.
RBC Capital analysts estimated the loss of output from the plant to be at around 2.5 GWh which at current market values would result in a loss to earnings of around £35 million.
“These do not include cost to repair (largely insured) or transactional costs of buying back forward contracted power that will now need to be sourced from elsewhere,” RBC Capital added.
“We also now need to consider the ability of SSE to participate in the upcoming UK capacity market where certain market estimates may have included additional revenues coming from these units,” the note added.
SSE said in a statement “ clearly adds to the challenging business environment”.
According to the latest update from SSE and the West Yorkshire fire department on Friday morning the fire has been brought under control, with all personnel accounted for and no injuries reported.