West Offaly Power Station

Location	Shannonbridge, County Offaly, Ireland
Total Capacity	150 MW
Type	Peat-fired, brownfield development
Configuration	Single unit
Commercial Operation	2005
Off-taker	Electricity Supply Board (ESB)
Decommissioned	December 2020 (peat fuel permission refused)

Project Overview

The West Offaly Power Station was a 150 MW peat-fired generating station in Shannonbridge, County Offaly, Ireland - at commissioning, the largest peat-fired plant in the country. The plant operated from 2005 until December 2020, when permission to continue burning peat was refused under Ireland's transition off indigenous peat fuel.

Why This Project Matters For Procurement Diligence

Foster Wheeler Oy developed this brownfield project as the EPC contractor and held end-to-end responsibility. In the first year of commercial operation, a design oversight tied to peat fuel chemistry caused severe corrosion of the baghouse and absorber towers. ESB, the Irish utility off-taker, prepared a $1.3 billion lawsuit against the contractor.

Smartland's senior leadership - operating as site manager during the corrective-action period under Foster Wheeler - was responsible for executing the repairs and resolving the outstanding technical and commercial issues over a two-year period. The result: ESB dropped the lawsuit. The plant returned to commercial availability and operated for fifteen years until the regulatory close-out in 2020.

For a procurement, finance, or lender team evaluating Smartland today, this is the relevant signal: our leadership has run the field response on a project where the off-taker had filed a billion-dollar claim - and brought that project back to compliant operation. Crisis-grade execution is a different skill than greenfield commissioning, and we have done it.