ROSS CLARK: "This polluting green sham has been mocking taxpayers for years - but Drax depriving taxpayers of £639 million last year by gaming the subsidy system takes the biscuit"

"Since 2016, we have collectively bankrolled Drax with £1.4billion of subsidies, but what have we got to show for the money? Certainly not clean air."

Aug 04, 2023

I was very pleased to see the following important article by Ross Clark published by The Mail online yesterday calling out the faux “green” scam that is Drax which I wrote about last year.

ROSS CLARK: This polluting green sham has been mocking taxpayers for years - but Drax depriving taxpayers of £639 million last year by gaming the subsidy system takes the biscuit
By ROSS CLARK • UPDATED: 00:53, 3 August 2023
Are we really surprised that the operators of Drax power station deprived taxpayers of £639million last year by – legally – gaming the subsidy system?
For years, the North Yorkshire power station has been draining our pockets, while we have been led to believe that its woodchip-fired boilers – which burn wood harvested mostly from North American forests – are providing us with a clean, carbon-free source of energy.
Since 2016, we have collectively bankrolled Drax with £1.4billion of subsidies, but what have we got to show for the money? Certainly not clean air –Drax continues to spew out sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxide and soot just as it did in its days as Britain's biggest coal-fired station, something belied by the photographs on its website of crystal-clear skies, cutesy graphics on 'sustainable bioenergy' and talk of our 'renewable future'. Neither has Drax given us carbon-free electricity – unless you turn a blind eye to a colossal bureaucratic sleight of hand.
Drax continues to spew out sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxide and soot just as it did in its days as Britain's biggest coal-fired station
Preposterously, the Government encouraged Drax, through tax incentives, to convert from burning coal to wood pellets because our net zero tsars regard this as a green way to generate electricity. That is in the face of overwhelming evidence that its chimneys spew out large clouds of CO2. According to a report by Chatham House in 2021, burning wood pellets at Drax is responsible for 13-16million tonnes of CO2 a year – equivalent to that produced by six to seven million petrol cars.
In fact, wood has a lower combustion efficiency than even coal, meaning that for every megawatt-hour of electricity produced, Drax spews out around 10 per cent more CO2 than a traditional coal-fired power station does. Were its carbon footprint to be entered on Britain's CO2 balance sheet, our national emissions would be between 2.8 per cent and 3.6 per cent higher than they are officially stated.
In a flagrant act of 'green- washing' (that is, elevating the environmental credentials of a project beyond what is credible), the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero disregards carbon emissions from the burning of wood pellets – often referred to as 'biomass' or 'thermal renewables'.
According to a report by Chatham House in 2021, burning wood pellets at Drax is responsible for 13-16million tonnes of CO2 a year
The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero disregards carbon emissions from the burning of wood pellets – often referred to as 'biomass' or 'thermal renewables'
The skewed logic goes that the trees cut down to produce the wood pellets will quickly be replaced and start sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere again. But, of course, while it takes seconds to burn a tree's worth of pellets in Drax's boilers, it will take decades for the replacement tree to remove anything like the same amount of carbon dioxide from the air.
By some calculations, burning wood pellets is even filthier than burning coal. A study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology compared wood-burning and coal-burning and calculated it would take between 52 and 82 years of forest regrowth before a woodchip power station could claim to be responsible for fewer carbon emissions than a coal-burning one.
Of course, that takes us well beyond the 2050 deadline for reaching net zero carbon emissions.
Not that such an inconvenient truth troubles the Government, which boasted last week that 41.5 per cent of the nation's electricity last year came from 'renewables' –more than the 40.8 per cent which was generated with the aid of fossil fuels. Yet over a quarter of this 'renewable' energy, in fact, came from Drax and the like incinerating 'thermal renewables'.
The company's own figures show that, in 2021, it was responsible for 6,882 tonnes of nitrogen oxide, 699 tons of sulphur dioxide and 418 tonnes of particulate pollution.
Since 2016, we have collectively bankrolled Drax with £1.4billion of subsidies
Moreover, the business of growing trees, chopping them down, turning them into wood pellets and transporting them across the Atlantic produces even more CO2. But, thanks to another sleight of hand, these emissions don't appear on Britain's carbon balance sheet because they occur overseas.
And Drax power station isn't only pumping out CO2. The company's own figures show that, in 2021, it was responsible for 6,882 tonnes of nitrogen oxide, 699 tons of sulphur dioxide and 418 tonnes of particulate pollution. These are the same pollutants which in London are accused of killing children and are used to justify mayor Sadiq Khan's expansion of the Ultra Low Emission Zone (Ulez). But when they are belching out of Drax's chimneys, they don't seem to count for anything.
What weird contortions of logic the Government is forced to make in order to try to claim progress towards its self-imposed net zero target. Plant a tree in the British countryside and it counts as a form of carbon sequestration. Indeed, part of the Government's net zero strategy is to plant 30,000 hectares of trees a year by 2025, funded by more massive subsidies. Cut down a tree in North America, ship it across the Atlantic and burn it in a Yorkshire power station, on the other hand, and it is supposed to be carbon-neutral.
Something doesn't add up. Drax Group Plc is bleeding us dry for the Government to perform an accounting trick and claim rapid progress towards net zero – when actually the money is not helping the planet one jot.
Ross Clark is the author of Not Zero: How an Irrational Target Will Impoverish You, Help China (and Won't Even Save the Planet)

Please also read the information I compiled last year about Drax purchasing old growth forests in Canada and elsewhere around the world to clear cut and ship to the heavily subsidised pollution factory here in the UK.