Thatcher's Secret Weapon in Miners' Strike Shuts, Ending an Era

Littlebrook power station, which towers grimly over the lower Thames near Dartford in Kent, ceases operations today after almost 35 years, the last of Britain's big oil-fired power plants to close.

Littlebrook is an unlikely symbol of modern Britain. But the power plant played a critical role helping the Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher break the miners' strike of 1984/85.

Now its closure marks the impact of higher oil prices and EU-wide policies, agreed by Britain's major political parties, to move away from fossil fuels to cleaner sources of electricity generation such as wind farms.

And the north Kent communities that made Thatcher's economic and political revolution possible by keeping the lights on during the strike are now top targets for anti-EU candidates in parliamentary elections to be held at the start of May.


Coal Plants and Smog
There have been power stations at Littlebrook since 1939, when the Kent Electric Power Company, a subsidiary of the County of London Electric Supply Company, built the first small coal-fired plant to meet London's rapidly growing electricity demand.

The first power station, Littlebrook A, was planned and built before Britain had a true national transmission grid, forcing most communities to rely on their own local generating station.

Emissions from the London plants contributed to the city's infamous smog, in the same way power plants in Beijing now cause smog in China's capital.

After the Second World War, two more power plants, Littlebrook B and Littlebrook C, were built on the same site. Both were originally designed to run on coal but were converted to run on heavy fuel oil during the late 1950s and 1960s.

The change of policy reflected the low oil prices which prevailed during the 1950s and 1960s as enormous new oil fields were opened up across the Middle East.

Britain's state-owned Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB), which had inherited the power plants as part of the nationalisation and unification of the industry, was anxious to reduce its dependence on coal.

Relying too heavily on coal left the CEGB vulnerable to commercial pressure from the state-owned National Coal Board (NCB), which was constantly pushing for higher prices, as well as strike action by the miners.


Coal and Prices
Littlebrook D was a much larger power plant designed from the beginning to run on fuel oil. Construction began in 1977 and the plant became operational in 1981.

By the time the power plant was ready to begin generating electricity, however, the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979 had made it uneconomic to generate electricity from oil, a classic example of the problem of trying to forecast future fuel prices when planning and building long-lived assets like power plants.

Littlebrook D might have been a white elephant were it not the bitter dispute which came to a head in 1984 between the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), the NCB and the Thatcher government over the closure of uneconomic pits.

The striking miners tried to cut the supply of coal to the nation's power plants to pressure the government and the NCB into a settlement by cutting coal production and convincing their allies in the National Union of Railwaymen to stop deliveries to the power stations.

The CEGB activated long-developed contingency plans, many of which are well known. The coal-fired power plants had built up large stocks to help them withstand a prolonged strike. And the CEGB was able to bring in coal from non-striking pits by road past furious, sometimes violent, demonstrations televised on the nightly news.

But it was Littlebrook and the other oil-fired power plants which were "by far the most important factor in maintaining electricity supplies" according to Frank Ledger and Howard Sallis, who helped run CEGB operations during the strike ("Crisis management in the power industry: an inside story" 1995).


Defeating the Miners
Littlebrook and the other oil-fired power stations - Kingsnorth and Isle of Grain, also on the north Kent coast, Fawley at Southampton and Pembroke in Wales - were ordered to run flat out to save coal stocks at other power plants.

The amount of fuel oil burned in Britain's power plants surged from 131,000 tonnes in the first week of the strike to 323,000 tonnes by the fourth week and reached a peak of 650,000 tonnes per week as the strike drew to a close.

The normal flow of electricity across Britain's national grid - from the big coal-fired plants in the Midlands and the North of England down to London and other cities of the south - was reversed. Littlebrook and the other oil-fired plants, most of them in southern England, sent power north to relieve strike-hit areas.

Other plants designed to burn coal, such as Tilbury and Didcot, were converted to fuel oil or a mix of coal and oil to boost power production further and conserve dwindling coal stocks.

Coal plants use some oil as "lighting up" fuel to stabilise their flames during the start up process. The CEGB modified them to burn more oil throughout their operation to minimise coal consumption, a phenomenon known as "overburn".

During the strike, Britain's power plants consumed 24 million tonnes of fuel oil, and saved almost 40 million tonnes of coal. Littlebrook alone consumed 3.5 million tonnes of fuel oil, about 17 percent of the total, and saved perhaps 7 million tonnes of coal during the strike.

To put that in perspective non-striking miners produced 24 million tonnes of coal during the strike, road deliveries supplied 24 million tonnes of coal to the power stations, and the power plants drew down 13 million tonnes from their stocks.

In January 1985, two months before the miners drifted back to work, more than 50 percent of Britain's electricity was being supplied by the oil-fired power plants and overburn.

Without the oil-fired power plants, the miners would have won their confrontation with the NCB and the government.

But the cost was high. The CEGB spent 3.3 billion pounds buying extra fuel oil during the 53-week strike, worth around 10 billion pounds today ($15 billion).

The CEGB's needs were so large they moved the global fuel oil price. Within three months of the strike ending, the price of fuel oil had fallen to $130 per tonne, from $190 where they had traded throughout the strike.


Oil Prices and Emissions
Now the oil-fired power plants that played such a pivotal role in 1984 are all gone. Grain and Kingsnorth shut in 2012 and 2013 respectively and have been demolished. Fawley has been closed since 2013.

For the most part, the oil-fired power plants are the victims of fuel economics. The soaring cost of oil made them far more expensive than the remaining coal-fired plants and the country's newer gas-fired stations.

In the past decade, the oil-fired plants have played a marginal role in Britain's electricity supply, providing high-cost electricity during peak demand periods and on stand-by during the winter in case of failures in other parts of the grid. Most of the time, however, they have been idle.

The EU's Large Combustion Plant Directive, which came into force at the start of 2008, set strict new limits on emissions of sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and particulates from coal and oil-fired power plants.

Power plant owners were given a choice to "opt in" and meet these limits, or "opt out", and be allowed to run their plants for no more than 10,000 hours between 2008 and 2015 before closing them.

The owners of Grain, Kingsnorth, Fawley and Littlebrook all chose to opt out because it made no economic sense to invest large sums improving their environmental performance when they generated on so few occasions.

Other oil-fired plants including Pembroke as well as Peterhead and Inverkip in Scotland had already closed or converted to cheaper gas.

Littlebrook's closure today marks the end of an era in which Britain used oil to generate electricity and change industrial relations forever, which is not a bad epitaph for a power station.
 

By John Kemp