The square after Pall Mall on the Monopoly board is theElectric Company. It would be too overfamiliar to visit Tate Modern and Battersea Power Station, plus neither of them still generate electricity, so I'm not going there. Instead I've identified the five largest power stations in the capital ranked by capacity in megawatts. All are large buildings with tall chimneys so stand out in their locality, and you might like to see if you can guess where they are before reading further.
n.b. The government provides an annual list of major power producer power stations as part of the Digest of UK Energy Statistics, or DUKES for short, so I've used their data. There are only nine such power stations in Greater London because belching fuel and major centres of population no longer mix.
London's biggest power stations
1) Enfield Power Station(408 MW) Type: Combined Cycle Gas Turbine Fuel: Natural Gas Location: Brancroft Way, Brimsdown EN3 7PL Commissioned: 1999
This is a post-Thatcherite pioneer, one of the first commercial projects specifically designed to supply electricity into the UK electricity pool. It was developed by a consortium of American companies who decided the arse end of Enfield was the ideal place to plonk a single shaft CCGT steam turbine and heat recovery steam generator. They hid it well. Enfield Power Station squats beyond the railway at the far end of a industrial estate beside the River Lea and a whopping reservoir. You might have clocked it from the train, you could have traipsed past it up a lonely towpath, but unless you live at Enfield Lock or work nearby in a big shed wearing a hairnet it's likely passed you by.
I'd never explored Brimsdown properly before, other than passing by on the 491 bus and thinking how unpretty it all looked. This side of the railway is a full-on sprawling workplace plied by vans and trucks - one of London's largest Strategic Industrial Locations - because mass manufacturing activity has to take place somewhere. Brancroft Road bears off by the Driving Test Centre (for lorries rather than cars) and curves round past thick hedgerows towards a puffy chimney. The powerstation is functional rather than attractive, a series of pipes and boxes rather than one big building, and looks like it would be relatively simple to disassemble. Three large silos feed the beast, white steam issues from multiple vents and the chimney has all the charm of a vacuum cleaner nozzle. No entry. No drones. Danger of death.
Across the road is one of Greggs 14 UK bakery sites, churning out melts, vegan sausage rolls and most recently pizza, behind that is a vast shed dispensing M&S Food and behind that the Warburtons bakery which feeds London and the southeast. Observing some of the Greggs employees sat out front at tables in the shadow of the power station, it did look like their employer had provided them with bags of pastry treats for breaktime consumption. I then followed an unlikely-looking public footpath which squeezed between the foot of the chimney and Brimsdown substation, an electricjungle of metal frames, spiky ceramics and thrumming coils. The alleyway eventually emerged in a backwoods recreation ground where multiple chains of pylons lead off to feed electricity up and down the Lea Valley, perhaps even powering the device you're reading this on. It all has an eerie beauty, but you'd never know.
2) Taylors Lane Power Station(132 MW) Type: Open Cycle Gas Turbine Fuel: Diesel/Gas Oil Location: Leicester Road, Willesden NW10 8JP Commissioned: 1979
Who'd have guessed that London's second largest electricity generator was inside the North Circular? Only just... up Neasden way not far from IKEA and the Hindu temple... but nowhere you'd build a power station today. Like Brimsdown it's located on the footprint of a former coal-fired station, and like Brimsdown it's operated by the same state-owned German multinational. They're Uniper, the world's largest energy company by revenue, whose portfolio also includes Ratcliffe-on-Soar, the Isle of Grain and three nuclear plants in Sweden. Taylors Lane is one of their smaller operations.
It ain't pretty, more a row of concrete shields with four white boxes stacked on top and two drab brown chimneys rising alongside. It looks slightly prettier viewed from Brentfield Open Space through a screen of leaves, and substantially less appealing from the footpath running alongside the adjacent electricity substation. Here I found half a sofa cushion and a abandoned microwave, plus an ageing sign warning DANGER 132,000 VOLTS on a fence protecting another spiky transformer menagerie. And this time people actually live close by, some in Edwardian terraces probably erected to house the original workers and others in postwar flats built after the air hereabouts got a lot cleaner. Incongruous as anything.
3) Riverside Resource Recovery(80 MW) Type: Bioenergy Fuel: Municipal Solid Waste Location: Norman Road, Belvedere DA17 6JY Commissioned: 2011
This one, by contrast, is as far away from a resident population as Ken Livingstone could manage. Its swooshing silhouette was tucked away on the Thames estuary in Bexley, just downstream from Crossness pumping station on the Erith Marshes. The closest businesses are mostly supermarket distribution centres and storage solutions, and nobody across the river at Ford Dagenham is going to complain either. Try not to confuse it with the similarly futuristic Crossness Sewage Incinerator nextdoor, whose purpose is to combust raw sludge cake at temperatures up to 950°C and whose chimney is less of a grey swirl, more of a grey bulge.
The Riverside Resource Recovery Facility instead exists to turn waste into electricity via a super-heated air-cooled process. It merrily munches through over three quarters of a million tonnes of London's waste per annum, the majority of which arrives by barge and is unloaded at the adjacent pier via a strikingly orange row of cranes. Its original purpose was to allow the closure of the landfill site downriver at Mucking, and a sign of its continuing success is that it's about to be expanded into a building called Riverside 2 which'll be able to process another 650,000 tonnes of non-recyclables. Unless you're heading down the Thames yourself, it's very much out of sight out of mind.
4) Edmonton EcoPark(58 MW) Type: Bioenergy Fuel: Municipal Solid Waste Location: Advent Way, Meridian Water N18 3AG Commissioned: 1970
Back to Enfield and the Lea, this time to the point where the North Circular surges across the valley. And also back in time because burning waste's not new, this place has been doing it for over 50 years, indeed it's one of the oldest Energy from Waste facilities in Europe. So far more than 21 million tonnes of rubbish have been diverted from landfill by the Edmonton EcoPark, and by now managers must realise that branding it an 'EcoPark' is fooling nobody. Again it's not especially close to where anyone lives, more where they come for out of town shopping, car parts or banqueting. And again it's in the process of being expanded, or rather significantly updated, because the original facilities are unsurprisingly nearing the end of their useful life.
The chimney on the old bit has two tiny prongs like something you'd plug into a continental socket. The two chimneys on the new bit are much thinner and almost pristine white, for now. Down below, beneath a footballpitchsworth of solar panels, can be seen a row of identical shuttered gates numbered from 1 to 13. Large megadustcarts arrive regularly at the front gate with muck to unload and take them round the back, but not (quite) yet into the new Resource Recovery Facility at EcoPark South. The most recent confirmed innovation is the opening of a Reuse and Recycling Centre (aka 'the council tip') which allows public access onto the site for the first time, but I hadn't brought any rubbish of my own so I didn't risk that.
5) SELCHP(30 MW) Type: Bioenergy Fuel: Municipal Solid Waste Location: Landmann Way, South Bermondsey SE14 5RS Commissioned: 1994
SELCHP stands for South East London Combined Heat and Power and is a waste incineration plant tucked into the railwaylands west of Deptford. It was set up by three local authorities to deflect unrecyclabes from landfill, a very worthy cause, and has been doing that for three hungry decades. You've probably seen it from the train on the way out of London Bridge, a large industrial shed with a thin chimney rising forth... much like the rest of the top five. Pass by on the Overground and you'll additionally see a dark cluster of giant downward vents in a box on the side, much like someone cut the tops off half a dozen rockets.
This is the only one of the five I've actually been inside, courtesy of Open House, while decked out in safety gloves and hi-vis for an incredibly memorable walkthrough. We followed a maze of walkways and landings to visit the infill hoppers, the rag-filled bunker, the main control room, the incineration grate and (through a thick glass window) the furnace with its raging flames. The whiff was pretty terrible in places but don't let me put you off, it was amazing to gain access to the belly of the beast and see where the contents of a binbag might ultimately end up. However it says a lot about the inefficiency of production that burning all this waste generates only a tiny fraction of the energy generated by the gas belcher in Enfield. In terms of energy production and energy consumption, London's still a world away from net zero.
n.b. Only four other London power stations appear in the government's database and they produce significantly less electricity. In 6th place are the wind turbines in Dagenham (6 MW) and the other three are solar arrays in Cranham, Crossness and Beckton (3 MW, 1½ MW, ½ MW).
n.b. Ten years ago Barking Power Station would have been top of the list, capable of generating 1000 MW of electricity, but that's fully decommissioned and lined up as the future site of the City of London's wholesale markets. The capital's new number 1 doesn't even make the national top 50.
n.b. Greenwich Power Station has a capacity of 155 MW so is arguably in second place in this list. However it exists as a standby for London Underground's power supply in case of emergency loss, not to feed the National Grid, so it's not in the DUKES database and I've disregarded it here.
