Cottam power station's 50th anniversary

Cottam power station has celebrated its 50th birthday with an evening of nostalgia as staff were invited to a special event where they swapped memories of life on the site over the past five decades.

Electricity was first produced at the station  and sent out to the National Grid on June 9 1968, and since then the site has produced enough power to keep the lights on in all the UK’s homes for around four and half years.

Darren Ramshaw, plant manager, said: "I am enormously proud to be part of the team here at Cottam, that despite the known market and economic challenges, continues to innovate and seek opportunities to improve the safety and performance of the site.

“Cottam’s achievements, great and small, have been made possible by people who are fiercely passionate and loyal to their station.

“The station has played an important role in the local economy for the past 50 years and all involved in the site are enormously proud of those links and rightly so.”

Since 1968 Cottam has generated a massive 482 terawatt hours of electricity, in more recent years it has also used 845,000 tonnes of biomass, representing a CO2 saving of 1.2m tonnes.  The four operational units have been started 12,637 times, and have run for more than one million hours.

EDF Energy will continue to operate its two coal stations while it remains safe and economic to do so and to contribute to security of supply during the transition to a decarbonised generation mix.

But the Government has decided that unabated coal-fired generation like Cottam has no long term role in a decarbonised electricity generation mix and EDF Energy, operator of Cottam and West Burton A coal-fired stations, supports these Government decarbonisation objectives.