The UK's nuclear power generation dropped to a 10-day low this morning, after an unplanned nuclear plant unit outage coincided with two planned outages over the weekend.
Nuclear power output was hovering around the 6.8GW mark this morning, down from an average of 8.5GW on the previous working day, 24 June, and an average of around 7.6GW so far in June.
The drop in power production from nuclear facilities came after the 620MW unit 2 at Hartlepool and 585MW unit 2 at the Heysham 1 plant were taken offline for planned outages that were expected to last until 18 August and 8 July respectively.
And the 500MW unit 8 at the Hinkley Point B plant then suffered an unplanned outage during the early hours of this morning, with the unit expected to be kept offline until at least 2 July. The UK's total installed nuclear power generation capacity stands at around 8.6GW.
The three units add to the shutdown at the 550MW unit 21 at the Dungeness B facility, which has been offline since 21 June, although it is scheduled to return to service tomorrow evening.
But an increase in metered wind power generation this morning largely offset the effect of the drop in nuclear plant output and reduced the requirement for fossil fuel-fired plants to ramp up their production to cover the shortfall in supply. Wind power output had averaged around 3GW so far this morning, up from an average of only 1.1GW over the whole of last week.
