Drakelow ‘C’ station construction started in May 1960 and Units 9 & 10 began generating in 1964. Unit 11 was commissioned in 1966 followed by Unit 12 in 1967. The station had a total generation capacity of 1450 MW and was a conventional asbestos/cement clad sheeting design unlike the brick built Drakelow A & B.
- Units 9 & 10 were 350 MW English Electric turbines supplied with steam from John Thompson boilers.
- Unit 11 was a 375MW English Electric turbine supplied with steam from a Babcock & Wilcox Supercritical boiler.
- Unit 12 was a 375MW A.E.I. turbine supplied with steam from an I.C.L. – Sulze
r Supercritical boiler.
Drakelow ‘C’ was a complicated site and soon gained a reputation as the most difficult station to operate and maintain due mainly to the two unique supercritical units. This wasn’t helped by the fact that attention in the industry quickly turned to developing the newer conventional 500MW units and supercrtitcal generation soon became a passing fad.
In 1978 Boiler 11 started to collapse due to a failure of the support structure in the top dead space. This resulted in the unit being scrapped.
In 1996 ‘C’ Station was given 
a new lease of life when National Power and PowerGen were forced by the regulator to sell part of their generation to create more competition and ‘C’ station was sold by Powergen to Eastern Electricity. The station generated a lot more after this sale and was later sold to American TXU who eventually pulled the plug on their European operation when they went bust in 2002. Ownership then returned to Powergen who took little time to shut down Drakelow `C’ for the last time in March 2003.
This was followed by decommissioning, asbestos removal and demolition. The six cooling towers were the final part of the demolition programme in September 2006.
