Its cooling towers have been a fixture on the Yorkshire skyline for decades, but inside Britain’s biggest power plant things have been changing apace. After years of burning polluting coal, Drax has switched to renewable biomass at three of its six units and recently won permission to convert a fourth.
All four biomass units are supported by green energy subsidies that should last until 2027, but the future after that is uncertain. The remaining two units still burn coal, due to be banned by 2025 and becoming increasingly uneconomic.
Drax has made a series of bold bets to diversify: it bought Opus Energy, a business energy supplier, and options to build four new open-cycle gas “peaking” power plants (OCGT) that could help to fill the