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LCPD bites as Npower announces March closure of Didcot and Fawley
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RWE Npower will close two power stations - Didcot A in Oxfordshire and Fawley in Southampton - by the end of March 2013, the company has announced.

Didcot is a coal-fired station and Fawley is oil-fired and both had “opted out” of installing scrubbers to remove pollutants. Under the European Union’s Large Combustion Plant Directive such plants had the option to close either by 2015 or when they had exhausted a limited number of operating hours.

Fawley and Didcot will close next year with some hours still on the clock, Npower chief operating officer Kevin McCullough told Utility Week, but the plants had reached the point where the cost of maintaining them made them no longer viable.

McCullough said that “the inevitability of closing Didcot and Fawley had been on the cards for a while” and staff had been kept up to date on plans.

The announcement comes as the company is set to formally open its new gas-fired power station at Pembroke.

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