British Energy was the UK's largest electricity generation company by volume, before being taken over by Électricité de France (EDF) in 2009.

Despite this, the new arrangements led to a significantly lower electricity price for inflexible base load power stations such as British Energy had.

The agreement was at the time held to be potentially worth around £550 million, bringing up to 800 jobs into Scotland and the rest of the UK.

This followed a slump in wholesale energy prices, a failure to obtain relaxations on the Climate Change Levy, and renegotiations of its back-end fuel costs with BNFL,[12] as well as issues with a number of its reactors (resulting in much capacity being offline during critical periods of the company financial crisis) and a failure to complete a timely sale of its joint-venture share in AmerGen.

Parties to the resulting talks included bondholders, significant but unsecured creditors, power purchase agreement counterparties, and a group of secured creditors known as the Eggborough banks; who had provided financing for the purchase of the Eggborough coal-fired power plant in 2000.

The plan that resulted from these talks nearly eliminated any equity interest of existing stockholders; the firm's creditors waived over £1 billion of debts in return for control of the company.

On 24 September the company was reclassified as a public body in what the Office for National Statistics described as a reflection of "the control that can be exercised by government over British Energy".

The restructuring of British Energy was subject to three National Audit Office reports; in May 1998, February 2004 and March 2006.

[19] On 1 April 2010, EDF transferred the coal-fired Eggborough power station to the plant's bondholders as per an earlier agreement, and in compliance with commitments made to the European Commission when agreeing the acquisition of British Energy.

[20] At the time of the EDF acquisition, British Energy operated the following power stations: In 2005, British Energy announced a ten-year life extension at Dungeness B, that would see the station continue operating until 2018,[21] and in 2007 announced a five-year life extension of Hinkley Point B and Hunterston B until 2016.