The 236m (778ft) chimney stack at the former Inverkip power station site near Greenock was brought down at 10pm last night by specialist contractor Brown & Mason.
ScottishPower project manager Dylan Hughes said that the demolition had taken months of discussions with experts including vibration specialists, explosives engineers and ecologists.
According to Scottish Power, Inverkip’s chimney was the tallest free standing structure in Scotland and third tallest in the UK. It contained more than 1,400,000 bricks and 20,000 tonnes of concrete.
The removal of the chimney stack will mark the end of a power station that was never able to fully operate as intended. Inverkip was an oil fired power station granted planning consent by the secretary of state for Scotland in March 1970. Construction began in October 1970 of a station consisting of 3 x 676MW units, with a total generating capacity of 2028MW.
However due to the soaring price of oil in the 1970s, the station was never commercially operated except in 1984/5 during coal shortages. The plant was kept as a strategic reserve until the late 1990s when it was mothballed.
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