This is a historical list of cooling towers associated with UK public electricity supply power stations. The list includes both wooden and reinforced concrete (RC) hyperboloid cooling towers. Spray ponds and finned tube cooling arrays are not included.
Power station cooling towers are used where there is insufficient water available from a source, e.g. a river or lake, to meet the cooling requirements of the power station. Cooling towers have been a feature of towns and cities since the 1900s and of the Midlands, Lancashire and South Yorkshire landscapes (particularly along the River Trent and the River Ouse) since the late 1950s.ÃÂ
From their peak numbers in the 1950s, there are now significantly fewer power stations with cooling towers. This has been driven by the demolition of urban power stations and of older, less efficient, stations. In 1966 there were 241cooling towers in operation; by 1984 this had fallen to 139 towers. Privatisation of the electricity industry in 1990 increased the rate of demolition, as further low efficiency power stations were decommissioned. The phasing out of coal for fueling power stations has virtually eliminated cooling towers from the UK landscape.
Cooling tower capacity is given in millions of UK gallons per hour (mgph) of cooling water flow; 1 mgph = 1.263 m<sup>3</sup>/s.