Salko UK has secured a new package of maintenance work across Uniper’s south-east England generation assets, centred on Once-Through Cooler and gas turbine exhaust works at Enfield Power Station and extending to ongoing maintenance support at Grain and Taylors Lane over the next four years. The contract adds to Salko’s existing footprint in GT26-related outage and repair activity, and gives the Yorkshire-based mechanical and electrical contractor a longer-term position inside part of Uniper’s flexible gas generation fleet.
At Enfield, the scope includes a high-priority tube bundle replacement intended to improve thermal performance, mechanical integrity, and operational reliability within the plant’s high-pressure cooling system. Salko said the works will cover removal, fabrication, installation, inspection, testing, and commissioning. The package also includes continued maintenance of the gas turbine exhaust system, a familiar area for the company, which already markets services covering GT26 exhaust housings, diffuser repairs, and OTC leak search and repair.
That background matters because these are not generic maintenance jobs. Once-through coolers and exhaust systems are both tied directly to reliability, outage risk, and maintenance interval performance in combined-cycle gas turbine operations. When those systems degrade, the consequences show up quickly in availability, thermal performance, and outage planning. Uniper’s Enfield, Grain, and Taylors Lane plants sit within a broader UK portfolio the company describes as part of its flexible generation base, so the commercial value of plant maintenance still rests heavily on start reliability and dispatch readiness.
Sim Sharphouse, operations manager at Salko UK, said the award reflected the company’s intention not only to maintain ageing assets, but to enhance their reliability over the longer term. The contract also sits alongside a wider turbine modernisation programme with GE Vernova at Grain, where three GT26 gas turbines are being upgraded following work already carried out at Enfield.
For service contractors in conventional generation, this is where the market remains active: not in pretending gas assets are static, but in extending, repairing, and modernising them so they can keep doing flexible system work while the wider energy mix changes around them. More on Salko’s power sector work is available at the company’s energy division page.
