A NEWPORT power station will be undergoing a £200m conversion in the next two years to generate clean power and create hundreds of jobs.

Uskmouth Power Station, which has been running in Newport since the 1960s, is owned by SIMEC Energy, who have joined forces with tidal power company Atlantis Resources Limited.

Both companies have merged together to create SIMEC Atlantis Energy. The new firm will become part of Sanjeev Gupta’s GFG Alliance, which also includes Liberty Steel Newport next door to Uskmouth.

The conversion will mean the power station will change from coal-fired to renewable energy (pelletised waste).

One of the main benefits of the change is that it will generate low cost, clean power that will allow Liberty’s adjacent steelworks to expand and start making liquid steel again, creating hundreds of jobs.

Jay Hambro, the chief executive of SIMEC Energy, said the change will help re-invent the power station and bring it up to date.

Mr Hambro said: "We have found a new future for Uskmouth with the waste solution and we thought this is a very good team of people to do the conversion and operate the plant with.

"Uskmouth is absolutely key to both SIMEC, to Sanjeev Gupta and his father and the GFG Alliance as a whole so we didn't want to sell the station.

"I think this is a transformation, Uskmouth is something that everyone in Newport sees on the horizon and its rather sad that it has mothballed."

The conversion will mean that the steelworks next door to the power station will be able to make steel again, and there will be new jobs available.

At the moment, the amount is unknown, but SIMEC Atlantis Energy believe there will be hundreds of roles up for grabs.

Speaking about how it will benefit Newport, the chief executive of Atlantis, Tim Cornelius, said: "When they (Uskmouth) started telling us about the idea of using waste and forms of waste in order to become a fuel source, this became an interesting story for us because we thought this has never been done in the UK before.

"If we can take waste which was already going to end up in landfill and extend the life of a power plant for 20 years, it means you are extending jobs and creating more. It's the ultimate goal.

"This is industrialisation the way it should be done in the modern era."

Uskmouth power station was built in 1959.

It has a generating capacity of 363 megawatts, which is enough to power 360,000 homes, or the surrounding area of Newport.