Most Islanders will be familiar with the twin chimneys of the power station in East Cowes – called the Cowes or Kingston power station – as they can be spotted for miles around.
What Islanders may be less familiar with is that the electricity that it generates doesn’t come to the Isle of Wight.
It is, in fact, an on-call generator for the Mainland. One that only runs a number of hours a year.
Where its power goes
The company that runs it, RWE Generation UK, has a contract with the National Grid, so that if the power on the Mainland drops and needs a bit of a boost, the East Cowes power station can be fired up to provide power to replace the missing electricity. Other similar stations around the UK do the same.
It’s an open cycle gas-turbine – not meaning that they burn gas (confusing eh?) – burning diesel oil (that is imported to the Island) in a gas-turbine. Historically it hasn’t been economic to run – but with electricity prices so high currently, this could change.
Using one of the three cables
One of the big issues with it is that one of the power cables that connect the Isle of Wight to the Mainland – there are only three of them in total – is devoted to that power station, even though it’s used so little.
The East Cowes power station provides useful capacity to the Mainland, but it leads to the Island being restricted in the amount of electricity we can generate currently.
IW potential for power generation
As we all know, the Isle of Wight is one of the sunniest places in the UK, meaning we could move towards not only being self-sufficient for electricity but providing a large amount of power to the rest of the country.
A recent presentation by Colin Palmer of Wight Community Energy hypothesised that the Isle of Wight’s soon-to-be-capacity to generate just under 150MW could reach over 500MW.
Restricting large scale solar PV installations
As there are in effect only two of the three cables connecting us to the Mainland available, the Island is being restricted and told that we cannot have any more large scale solar PV installations as the electricity cannot be exported.
This restrictions is not good at the best of times, but at a time where the cost of gas-generated electricity is going through the roof, and we as a country are looking for energy independence, a major issue.
Image: Mark Pilbeam under CC BY 2.0
