LONDON (Reuters) - Environmental campaigners climbed the chimney of the UK's Didcot power station on Monday but had no impact on production, a spokesman for the UK unit of German utility RWE said.
About 20 protesters got into the power station site in Oxfordshire on Monday and shut it down, according to the Camp for Climate Action group, a claim denied by the plant operator.
German utility E.ON said this month it would shelve plans for a new coal-fired power plant at its Kingsnorth power station in Kent which has been the focus of environmental protest over the last few years.
"Since E.ON shelved their plans to build a new coal plant at Kingsnorth this month, we realized N-Power is the new frontline," Amy Johnson, one of the protesters, said in a statement.
"We're going to stay here until they say they'll stop building new coal plants. We know that might take a while but we're patient."
Data from National Grid shows two of the four coal-fired units at the plant were still running late on Monday morning, with another already on a planned outage.
A fourth 485-megawatt generation unit tripped on Monday morning due to a "technical issue," the spokesman said.
"It has nothing to do with the protest," he said.
The protesters, which split into two groups -- one scaling the chimney and another trying to stop coal from being fed into the plant -- say they have enough food and water to stay in place for weeks and plan to starve the plant of fuel.
The RWE spokesman said there were already stocks of coal in the plant and that the company could switch to burning more gas if it were to run out.
(Reporting by Daniel Fineren; editing by Sue Thomas)
