Through improving the thermal efficiency of our power station we can reduce our emissions of CO₂.

Such improvements rely on recent advances in technology and tend to be capital intensive. Current technology options range from upgrading the turbines to retrofitting supercritical boilers.

We have committed to a £100 million capital investment programme to upgrade our high pressure and low pressure turbines. The result will be an improvement in our overall baseload efficiency of 5%, taking it towards 40%, and an annual saving of one million tonnes of CO₂.

Looking ahead, providing the confidence to invest significant sums requires a stable and certain policy framework. We are contributing to the Government’s discussions on how best to achieve this through existing policy mechanisms, such as the EU Emissions Trading Scheme.