THE world's first wood-fuelled power station - hailed as a buyer of farm coppice wood - now nearing completion near Selby, has hit more problems.

The £30m plant at Eggborough is already more than two years behind schedule following "difficulties" with the former main contracting firm, which subsequently went bankrupt.

Now there has been another setback, with the synthetic gas cooling system being regularly blocked with dust particles.

Arbre Energy, which is the developer, said it had now "grasped the nettle" and spent a further £600,000 on a new gas turbine cooler.

Business manager Barry Patterson said it was planned to install the new equipment in August, after which the plant should be ready to start feeding electricity into the national grid on a regular basis.

At present, because of the problems, it can only produce power for about five days and then staff have to shut down the whole station for up to three weeks to clean out the cooler.

The revolutionary Eggborough plant will burn 80,000 tonnes of willow coppice a year, producing enough electricity to meet the daily demands of more than 33,000 households.

Updated: 08:49 Thursday, May 30, 2002