From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
h/t Dave Ward
More on the environmental obscenity called Drax from Ross Clark:
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.
Full post here.
There is no doubt that Drax is a green scam. However, Drax does produce reliable power which is more than can be said for solar and wind power.
That’s a case of every silver lining having a very large cloud
Yes it does, but not the clean, green type the eco loons keep banging on about
Personally, I would remove all fossil & nuclear generation from the grid, just for a week, so their vital importance to a safe, healthy secure society are indelibly etched into the heads of politicians and citizens
You could probably accomplish the same thing by only offering renewable power exclusively (i.e., they get renewable power when available, but no fossil or nuclear) and priced on a cost-plus basis. I doubt if there would be many takers :<)
Better yet, give people the option to choose them, with the caveat that they are locked in for a month and cannot back out.
Then see how many signs up for a second month.
While I’m not an advocate of burning wood on an industrial scale to produce electricity, the claim that it “spews out Sulphur Dioxide” is bogus. Wood has a negligible Sulphur content which is evident in large databases of wood chemical composition analysis (e.g. “Phyllis”). The tiny amount of Sulphur that is detected is almost certainly the result of surface contamination.
Burning wood for home heating is actually environmentally and economically sound, particularly in rural areas where there is plenty of dead wood or unproductive trees and is carbon neutral. One acre of wooded land produces more new wood mass annually than is typically required to heat a house for a year.
Rick, provided you don’t consider particulate matter a pollutant. But I agree in rural areas who cares?
The figure I have for state grant subsidies paid to DRAX in year ending April 2023 is £980 million not £639 million. Then again what is a mere £341 million in Green subsidies between a few Greens outstretched hands?
It is indeed scandalous but when governments start throwing money around the pigs all rush to the trough – and can you blame them?. Wasn’t there a similar daftness in Northern Ireland a few years ago when stuff was being burned unnecessarily just to get profitable subsidies? Some idiot civil servant hadn’t thought things through!
The basis of calculation is not about the subsides Drax received. The assumption was that Drax should have operated its CFD unit at the strike price of £126/MWh even when it was unprofitable to do so, and this would have resulted in payments to consumers of £639m. The analysis (by Bloomberg) is wrong: the fictional £639m would at best have offset some of the the extra retailers would have paid to Drax for overpriced hedges. See my post below for detail.
When the facts are on your side, you don’t have to lie to make your point. Putting up an image of water vapor coming from the Drax cooling towers with a caption
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’
that tells us about “carbon emissions” is dishonest.
Were it anything but a veneer of “green” able to be merely blown off by the wind, the “waste” heat liberated by those cooling towers would not go to waste. In fact it wouldn’t even exist to pose a problem. The “green revolution” is awaiting new technology–technology that somehow breaks physical laws it seems. Good luck with that…
Although this looks like waste, the cooling towers actually improve steam turbine efficiency. Just simple thermodynamics.
Yes, I’m fully aware of why the “wet” steam must be condensed back into water before returning to the boiler. To say it’s about “increasing efficiency” is stretching the truth–it’s about preventing destruction of the generation equipment!
Regardless of what you say all of that “waste energy” from the cooling tower in order to “increase efficiency” of the turbines is an inherent waste of the sort that “alternative energy” must eliminate if it ever to fulfill its wild promises.
No matter how thick that layer of greenwash, it’s still a veneer ready to be washed away in the first storm.
China plans to locate their $trillion plus worth of new nukes near industrial areas and utilize the otherwise “wasted” heat. Engineers rule not woke democrat politicians..
Yes, but the proles think it’s pollution, not steam, because that’s what the green blob sells them
And that was the point! Thank your for pointing out what should
have been obvious to most of those who post here at WUWT.
I would rename it the Dept for Energy Security OR Nut Zero
Dept for Energy Scams…
If that was a FF power station the BBC would be showing backlit photos so the steam would be black, thus “pollution”
I’ve challenged the BBC on this before and I get a stock answer like “we have no control over how a stock photograph is lit”
But they have total control over which photo they choose to use.
What about the energy required to convert the pallets into pellets?
The station is claimed to use mostly wood “recovered” from pallets.
Pallet lumber is the worst grade of saleable dimensional wood. It’s not even dried–properly at least as particularly when the source is pine the huge number of knots are positively dripping resin
While I realize that the pellet making process yields a [relatively] pure fuel, the contaminates removed go somewhere–likely directly and practically irretrievably to the atmosphere. Thus that relatively “clean” biofuel is not, at all, clean and this is just another example of so-called “greenwashing.”
While pallet lumber is among the lowest grades of dimensional lumber, it is a mistake to assume that it is all from the pine species. Pine is used in roughly half of the construction of pallets mainly due to the low cost of the lumber. Hardwoods are used in the other rough half with oak being used mostly along with other species such as maple and walnut. Hardwood pallets have greater weight capacity, durability and lifetime.
Green lumber is lumber that has only been dimensional cut and not dried and is rarely used in pallet construction. Most all pallet lumber is kiln dried which increases strength and durability.
Of course it’s not all pine. I live in an area where pallets–lots of them–in both soft and hardwood varieties are manufactured as just one of the uses for “scrap” from the lumber industry.
“Junk” pallets and pallet lumber scraps used to be easy to find. They helped heat the homes of the self-reliant and the workshops, garages and other buildings of the self-employed. That’s how it works for many of us in “flyover country” you know.
Now I have a great idea why you don’t see “junk” pallets and pallet scraps anymore. The British public is being duped into buying them at inflated prices because they’re a vital “new” source of alternative energy that–unlike the rest–is actually reliable as long as they have a secure market for their fuel and the subsidies/high rates required to buy it by artificially creating high demand for a product used by people without the means to provide the subsidy.
Greenwash layer upon greenwash layer. Don’t you have any good arguments? Have you even seen a pallet in real life much less made use of any old one for just one of their myriad practical uses before they are ultimately returned to the environment via burning–or rotting (composting) which is/was yet another use–cheap, short-lived, soil-improving mulch?
A lot of pallets I’ve seen recently have blocks of chip board type material which I guess is not good as fuel in Drax
They’ve already bought all the “good ones” perhaps? It’s going to take a LOT of pallets to fuel that monster!
In the “wild west” of the climate change industry where everyone is out to grab some “free” government money by any possible means, it would not surprise me in the least if brand new pallets are loaded into trucks bound for pellet works with “exclusive” rights to Drax.
And really. What a name. Which came first; that company or the Bond villain? Or, perhaps, Ian Fleming was making a point decades ago.
There is no way the wood is coming mostly from pallets, pallets are extremely hard to get these days in the US, recycled grade B pallets the cost for a standard pallet has jumped over 300% in the last 2 years, pallet recyclers use every bit of of wood they can get their hands on. The cost has been as high as $11 for a grade B pallet.
Isn’t there something in economics that says “When demand goes up, the price goes up”?
Yes, but the demand is here in the US it’s not because of Drax.
Actually that would tend to confirm my theory. Pallet makers–likely those from a Commonwealth nation to the North of the USA have sweetheart guaranteed purchase deals for their #1 pallets at above market price. The fact that they are never used a pallets as immaterial. This drives up the price for the remaining pallets–particularly that #2 grade. It’s called having your cake and eating it too and that’s exactly what happens when government subsidizes this sort of thing on the backs of ordinary consumers by telling them, “It’s all for your benefit.” What a load of crock because it’s about what happens every time government steps into markets where they have no business being–“free” money ripe for the picking by the most rotten among us–there are lots of names and subtle classifications for them but the most heinous are the ones used to make it “legal”–lawyers.
Convert it back to coal…
That would be the logical and sane thing to do. However, no British government will allow that to happen. Drax cannot be closed down since it provides 6% of Britain’s electricity and Britain is in danger of power cuts this winter. So we are stuck with Drax for the foreseeable future.
The sane thing would be to build several more, just the same, and run them on our own coal. The subsidy would then not be required, in fact, they would make a lot of profit with the electricity price so high. The idea could lower the price substantially, but of course no one wants that, except the poor public!
They should bury the wood in North America and replace it with coal from England that would be way cheaper.
I doubt you would be very much surprised that the climate cheerleaders in the meejah world are blanking the utter farce known as Drax. In fact, they’re heavily engaged in maintaining the level of alarm, and where possible, increasing it.
We’ve had at least 6 weeks of cool wet weather – a barbecue summer as the MO would have it. All the good stuff has passed us by, but that does not deter them.
“Ocean heat record broken, with grim implications for the planet
It reached 20.96C. That’s far above the average for this time of year.”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-66387537
In south London it’s just edging 18C…
Show me the hurricanes…
No news is good news, especially regarding Climate Doomsday. If anything good should happen — higher crop yields anywhere, improvements in forestry, no abnormal floods or droughts — it should be ignored. If some weisenheimer somehow sneaks in good news, it should be maliciously distorted.
ONLY anecdotes and cherry-picked data implying imminent apocalypse should be published.
Unfortunatly, even here in far-away New Zealand, that BBC-scaremongering is rebroadcast nightly on our so-called television-news! Interesting that someone, somewhere, thought they could measure ocean-temperatures to a few hundredths-of-a-degree!
Is there evidence for “just as it did?” Seems unlikely. There should not be the same sulphur or silica content in “forest product” as in coal. Sulphur dioxide and soot should not be “just as” it was.
Drax was always a greenwash, and should have been a temporary lead-in to getting better legislation (removing restrictions to using UK waste cellulose) and to building a system of using cleaner (than coal) biomass power generation. But even modern coal burning generation would be better, and more economically sustainable and sensible, than carrying on with importing wood waste from North America.
Even better would be to frac for natural gas and to pump North Sea oil and gas. Conservative governments keep dancing at the edge of commitment both, and Labour is unlikely to embrace them.
If they are actually burning pallet wood, which I doubt, there are way worse things coming out of those stacks. Pallets are used over and over again and are covered in all most every industrial chemical known to man.
I’ve read from several sources that Drax “biomass” is burning pellets, not pallets. Healthy forests in Nova Scotia, the Carolinas and Louisiana are being clearcut, pelletized, shipped across the Atlantic in bulk cargo ships, sent inland to the power plant, and burned for electricity.
Drax was originally designed to burn coal mined within a 20-mile radius, but greenies in their infinite wisdom decided that actual green trees 4,000 miles away should be obliterated for their lowest-value use, so that Britain’s largest power plant can revert to the pre-industrial fuel that Britain exhausted locally 250 years ago.
Pretzel logic at best.
If it was economical to burn wood for power, why is it not the case that it is burned for power where the trees are available firsthand, with no need to pelletize them and ship them half a world away?
I do not know of any power plants that burn wood in the US, or in Canada. But maybe they do, and no one ever talks or writes about it?
“spew” is a word that can hide an awful lot of meanings 🙂
Correct. To emit sulfur dioxide, there must be sulfur in the fuel. Nitrogen dioxide, on the other hand, can come from nitrogen bound in the fuel or from atmospheric nitrogen. Particular matter (soot) is going to be an issue for any solid fuel fired boiler.
Story tip
https://davidturver.substack.com/p/pillars-supporting-net-zero-crumbling
Superb Nut Zero analysis by David
Unfortunately, Bloomberg (who orginated the story) got it wrong.
The real story is that the bad design of the Drax CFD meant that the capacity was only available last winter during the period of extreme system stress. It was not available to help displace expensive gas imports.
Here’s the real story:
Biomass CFDs are index linked to inflation, but not even partially to the cost of woodchip fuel. The basis for deciding how much payment is made or received for any production is the difference between the Baseload Market Reference Price and the inflation indexed CFD Strike Price. When BMRP is below the strike price, consumers get to subsidise the production for the difference. When BMRP is above strike price then consumers get the difference as a refund eventaully – at least so long as there is output.
What is the BMRP? It’s the average price for whole season baseload contracts for the season ahead (summer trade for the next winter, and winter trade for the next summer) as reported by the London Electricity Brokers Association. As you might imagine, trade in such an abstruse definition is sporadic and sparse, so prices are set on very little actual traded volume. Baseload prices were heavily inflated last summer by the energy crisis, and in particular the shortage of French nuclear output due to the heavy maintenance programme, which threatened a EUrope wide shortage of baseload availability inculding via interconnectors to the UK (indeed, the UK spent long periods supplying France). So the reference price for last winter was £405/MWh, which turned out to be way above the average day ahead price over the winter which was around £130/MWh – but with December averaging just over £200/MWh, with some intraday spikes to much higher levels.
The Drax CFD was worth £126/MWh until April (it is now at £142/MWh after inflation uplift), so production over the winter incurred what was effectively a tax of £279/MWh (405-126), due to the design of the CFD. That meant it was only economic to operate at times of extreme system stress when prices were much higher than £405/MWh – and that is what we see in the chart. The “tax” prevented the unit from backing out backing out expensive gas in December in particular when prices were highest.
What Bloomberg assumed was that Drax should have sold their output forward to hedge the CFD payments they would make on production. That assumption ignores reality. Firstly, if they had sold at prices above £405/MWh, a retailer would have bought at those prices and have to pass them on to customers in their bills. Secondly, it is almost certain that at £126/MWh Drax would have lost money because the price of woodchips would have escalated, most likely in sympathy with coal. The other 3 units that get ROC subsidies on top of market prices worth around £90/MWh, which meant that they continued to operate profitably. There is no way that Drax would have operated its CFD unit at a loss. Instead, it would have bought in other supply to meet its forward sale contracts and pocketed the difference in trading profit. The retailers would have been left nursing their losses on purchasing expensive hedges.
Drax decided not to attempt to sell forward hedges for its CFD unit, but simply only to operate when extreme market stress made it profitable. This actually saved consumers money, as retailers were able to procure alternative supply much cheaper the rest of the time. However, if Drax had been operating on a market basis there would have been other times when it could have undercut CCGT profitably: this is where consumers lost out, thanks to the bad CFD design.
Remove subsidies and tax preferences and all our problems go away. They are the problem not the solution.