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Drax power plant, which dominated the North Yorkshire village near Selby for more than half a century, received Another lease of life This week. The Biomass production plant with 12 water cooling towers will continue to produce electricity up to at least 2031, thanks to the renewed support of the Government.
Drax was built as a plants on coal in 1974 and later turned into wood pellets. This has surpassed many others, but longevity does not equate with popularity. From the green campa
This explains the defensive tone of this week’s announcement of the fresh basis for DRAX and the fact that Ed Miliband, the Secretary of Energy, did not personally do so. He is left to the Minister of Energy to Michael Shangs to distract his energy inheritance from conservatives and drawn the “much more limited” role of DRAX from 2027 onwards, with the halting of public subsidies.
This is a painful compromise, but it is also necessary. This only helps Miliband’s ambition to convert Britain into cleaning electricity production by 2030. If you think carbon broadcasting is completely different from the burning of gas by burning wooden pellets. But drax has one clear advantage over the new nuclear power plants that the government is the substrate For the energy transition: it already exists.
Shares in the Drax Group, a power plant that has increased on news and from relief and because the market does not believe Miliband. Neither should that. Many complex and expensive investments are required without delay to make the electric network better and reduce fossil fuel energy production to low levels. It is sure to assume that Drax will be with us for a while.
Drax benefits from a peculiar regulatory arbitration that results in the production of biomass energy to zero rated according to British and European carbon standards. The pellets that are mostly imported from North America are considered to be a renewable energy source, although its emissions are greater than any other power plant in the UK, according to the EMBER Research Group. It was a monetary monetary amount of £ 25 million Last year to keep the appropriate source information.
This environmental trick is no longer convincing. Drax says his shows balanced by the fact that the trees absorbed by carbon complain to make pellets. It may be so, but to ignore them is completely absurd. Biomas should fall somewhere between the wind farm and the fossil fuel in the green book.
But Drax’s ecological imperfection is a bad argument to turn off by ending all support, as some wanted. This would risk about 5 percent of the future capacity in the UK and increased the addiction of a network on gas and nuclear power plants (together with European relationships) for energy when time is bad for solar energy and wind production.
Wind made up 30 percent of electricity produced in the UK last year. But its spread does not abolish the need for gas or biomass plants that may be included when needed. Indeed, the more decarbonizing the system, the more fragile it could become as such plants lose their jobs on cheaper renewable energy sources.
Last year, a decarbonisation study by the National Engineering Center for Engineering Policy concluded that the UK may need to build more gas plants to maintain generating capacity in the future. The official operator of the National Energy System, who warned of the pace that the change “at the border of what is feasible,” supported the Drax retention based on energy security.
The government tacitly recognized the point. Instead of treating Drax as a source of renewable energy sources in a conventional financial way, the contract is quite similar to a capacity contract with a gas operator. Drax will remain in the service, but will not work at more than half of today’s level, and “excess will get” will return.
It is unclear what will happen after March 2031, when the job should run out. DRAX wants to install the carbon cap equipment and storage so that it no longer broadcasts greenhouse gases and can trade with credit shows. This technology is unverified and very expensive, although Drax has a record that he keeps one step ahead of obsolescence.
I bet on further delays, not only to capture carbon, but also to the Miliband -the schedule of pure energy. This is a message of this week with Drax. Having a vision is wonderful, but the risk of lighting light by closing the unpopular power plant would be reckless.
