Re: Ageing fossil and nuclear plants are going off-line
"including paying fines of over GBP 30 million for one station which had signed up to the governments "capacity market" auction for 2018 onwards"
Oh, I missed that. I'd seen the closure announcement (3 of 4 units, ie 1.5GW out of 2GW, to close [1]), but hadn't seen discussion of a ~£30M penalty for non-delivery to the capacity market [2]. Still, what could possibly go wrong.
"another couple of quick-build gas generators."
Filling fields with banks of diesel generators seems to be fashionable at the moment as it's even quicker to profit than the original "dash for gas" or "dash for gas 2.0". Diesel's not exactly low carbon, but hey, money talks.
Someone should also point out that SSE could have chosen to invest in their coal fired stations (not just Fiddlers Ferry) in order to achieve compliance with the 10+year old Large Combustion Plant regulations, which limit the number of hours of pollution a coal station can produce, but SSE chose instead to live with the limited hours and shut down afterwards [3]. And now it's caught up with them, and the victims of the underinvestment are not going to be SSE management, they're going to be SSE employees who lose their jobs, and you and me when the lights go out.
[1] http://sse.com/newsandviews/allarticles/2016/02/consultation-on-future-of-sses-fiddlers-ferry-power-station/
[2] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/12128668/Energy-security-threat-as-SSE-mulls-early-closure-of-coal-plant.html
[3] BBC4's excellent documentary Power to the People, co-produced with the Open University, covered Ferrybridge in episode 1; not on iPlayer, try this for background
http://www.open.edu/openlearn/whats-on/tv/power-the-people
and for the programme itself try this, and see if you can see any evidence of significant investment in recent decades (e.g. in the kind of control systems that might have allowed LCPD compliance):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSoa6XKgJXo