YP Letters: Drax has not become green through biomass

IN his article, ‘Why is government stalling on green revolution at Drax?’ (The Yorkshire Post, March 14), John Grainger portrays the owners of Drax power station heroically struggling to protect and further develop their source of green, sustainable energy, for all our good.

In reality, its biomass-burning technology does not constitute a renewable or clean form of energy. It uses vast amounts of wood stripped from clearcut wetland forests in the southern US, much of it by pellet producer Enviva (which has been heavily criticised by environmental NGOs in the US) and transported across the world. In the article, Drax’s CEO, Andy Kloss, himself admits that transport is a major issue for the company.

Drax is now the biggest biomass power station in the world. Yet after burning the equivalent of more than the UK’s entire annual wood production, year on year it only generates 0.7 per cent of the UK’s energy use. Using clean energy subsidies to pay for a power station that burns imported wood pellets from clearcut biodiverse forests, and millions of tonnes of coal, is unacceptable. To make matters far worse, the Government has been slashing support for genuinely low-carbon, renewable energy.