Essay by Eric Worrall
h/t Steve Richards; … ‘A large part of profits come from public subsidies Drax is given by claiming that burning forests is good for the planet.’ …
Drax seeks new handout despite £300m buyback
Drax wants ministers to provide support through to the end of the decade
By JOHN ABIONA
UPDATED: 19:37 AEST, 27 July 2024
The UK’s biggest wood burner is in talks with the Government over further handouts to cover funding its controversial biomass plant.
Despite whopping profits and a £300million share buyback, Drax wants ministers to provide financial support through to the end of the decade.
It has been handed more than £6billion of subsidies for the power station in Selby, North Yorkshire that generates more than 4 per cent of the UK’s electricity.
…
Matt Williams, of Cut Carbon Not Forests and advocate for US environmental advocacy group Natural Resources Defense Council, said: ‘It is unacceptable this company is burning the world’s forests and making money hand over fist from environmental harm.
‘A large part of profits come from public subsidies Drax is given by claiming that burning forests is good for the planet.’
Read more: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/money/markets/article-13677211/Drax-seeks-new-handout-despite-300m-buyback.html
…
£6 billion in subsidies is a lot of money – around £90 for every man, woman and child in Britain. I wonder how many Britons would prefer £90 in their pockets rather than in the pockets of Drax’s shareholders.
According to DeSmog Blog, in 2023 Tory politicians received £48,000 in donations from companies connected to Drax. DeSmog claims Labour also accepted a lesser donation of £12,000 from Drax. Obviously I’m not suggesting such donations in any way influence whether politicians support Drax’s request for more subsidies.
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Yet more rent seekers.
Subsidies are a bad idea. These subsidies are doing nothing more than pretending a bad idea works. Government bureaucrats and administrators should be the last people to decide if something is good for us or not.
Build a nuclear facility and stop burning our** forests.
I live in The Great Left State of Washington so I don’t think
Drax is burning “our” trees, but still …
WA has a “Carbon” fee so I pay, and pay, and ,,,
We can’t even build houses
The price for wood keeps going up because there isn’t enough excellent forestry- partly due to these climate whack jobs who hate all forestry.
Actually, here in the USA, lumber prices are down from the covid peak and have not been bigly affected by inflation. Standing timber aka stumpage prices (a mostly separate market) on private land in the SE US, where Drax gets their pellets from, are depressed and have been for years. There is an over supply of mature forests when farmers converted to timber in the 1980’s and pulp mills shut down. Pellet mills can use smaller, low quality logs too. Pellets are cheap and will be for a while. Out west is a different set of conditions because sawmills depend more on limited public timber sales and they still have to compete at market prices for lumber including supply from Canada.
Down from the Covid peak but still high by historical standards. Here in Wokeachusetts, the state won’t allow the pellet plants though many people like their pellet stoves. In general, the state is trying to further crush the barely surviving forest industry- saying, any remaining forestry must be “climate smart”- meaning cut very light and far less often. That goes against proper silviculture and forestry economics. But, the state says, they’ll heavily subsidize what’s left- meaning more burreaucracy and tons more paper work for the industry.
How many thousands of acres of forest or woodlands have been cut down in the UK to make room for wind farms and solar farms? How many acres of farm land removed for the same? Asking for a friend.
None at all. It’s US forests that get turned into pellets and shipped across the pond to feed the fire.
https://news.mongabay.com/2024/05/uks-drax-targets-california-forests-for-two-major-wood-pellet-plants/
Sorry, should have read the whole comment. Thought you were asking how much UK forest gets turned into pellets for Drax.
More than 16,000,000 trees have been felled in Scotland alone to make way for wind farms
Any subsidy is guaranteed to attract fraud and corruption like flies around a cow pat.
Drax… pronounced “Drags…”
They’d better watch out
Council slaps household with £175 fine for using wood burning stove which emits ‘unreasonable and excessive smoke”
‘https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/council-slaps-household-with-175-fine-for-using-wood-burning-stove-which-emits-unreasonable-and-excessive-smoke/ar-BB1qqw1B
Yeah, but Drax is exempt because it’s saving the planet, Strat
Indeed. But first one has to burn the planet.
Drax is “We own the science – in your face”
politics, what are you going to do about it.
what are you going to do about it?
Drax Warns Subsidy Decision Needed in 2024 to Unlock Investment. https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/investing/commodities/2024/07/26/drax-warns-subsidy-decision-needed-in-2024-to-unlock-investment/
Keep stumping up, I suppose.
For those of us that ever chopped firewood that power plant consumes 670 cords of wood per hour.
A “cord,” is a stack of wood that measures 4 feet wide, 4 feet tall, and 8 feet long; a volume of 128 cubic feet (3.62 m3). Sometimes, one sees the term “face cord” that is one-third of a cord. Pieces of firewood are commonly 16 inches long and positioned as 3 stacks of 4 ft high by 8 ft long.
The WEB has photos of this amount of wood, and several other non-standard units.
In the early history of Boston, canals were developed to facilitate bringing firewood into the growing city.
We have a similar situation with the water companies in the UK. Thames Water is up to its eyeballs in debt and on the verge of bancruptcy and yet they’re paying out millions to shareholders. Stinks
That’ll be the lack of maintenance carried out by Thames on the sewers
The difference between Drax and Thames Water is that ordinary people can buy shares in Drax whereas Thames Water is not traded.
And just like that,,,,,clear cutting forests became the savior of the climate.
“h/t Steve Richards; … ‘A large part of profits come from public subsidies Drax is given by claiming that burning forests is good for the planet.’”
nobody is burning forests
I agree the subsidies are a bad idea- I think there should be no subsidies for any form of energy or any other enterprise. Swim or sink on your own. I also think all bureaucracies should be slashed by 90% or dismantled entirely. I detest bureaucracies. (burro-ocracies)
But the forestry work producing the wood is a good idea. Only a an idiot would say they are burning forests. That’s the language of the climate whack jobs who hate forestry- because they want no trees to be cut- so that the forests can do nothing but sequester carbon. The hell with anyone who needs wood for a home or wood for furniture.
So, Steve Richards, stop claiming they are burning forests. In fact, forestry down in Dixie seldom sees fires like out West where there now is little forest mgt. Other than the fires they start for controlled burns. Good forestry reduces fire hazards.
If there is enough subsidy, and if adequate plant performance means the subsidies keep coming, the wood burners may outbid the cabinet makers in order to get the wood they need. It is an open market, not a religious practice.
False. The wood that goes to the burners is low grade wood- not wood that would go to cabinet makers. The wood that goes to cabinet makers is worth orders of magnitude more- so “wood producers” are very careful on how they sort the wood.
False, the wood goes to whomever wants it and has the money to pay for it.
No doubt each market niche tends to get the wood most suitable for its purposes. However, money rules the market. If the wood burners want more wood than is available in the low lumber quality yard, and can pay for it due to their very large subsidies, they will buy whatever is available, not just what someone else thinks they should use.
There is some competition for the LOWEST GRADES OF WOOD- but not the high quality wood that goes into the best construction lumber, furniture, etc. And, there’s a lot of low quality wood down in Dixie so there is no need to be buying premium wood by pellet/biomass buyers. THAT’S REALITY. The subsidies aren’t really all that much. There are subsidies for biomass firms in New England- yet they can only afford to pay something like a dollar/ton of low grade wood on the stump. And here too- there’s a vast amount of “junk wood”. The economics of biomass aren’t great- so without subsidies, it can’t happen- but even without subsidies, pellet firms could be profitable here but the state(s) are prevent it because the greens don’t want ANY forestry. I know people with pellet stoves- their pellets come from the PNW- some from BC. There are some pellet companies in the northeast but not enough for the potential market. One reason more people don’t buy pellet stoves is the shortage of pellets- in a sea of millions of acres of “junk wood”. The world’s most fanatic forestry haters live right here where I live- in Wokeachusetts. They lead that fight against forestry. I know their names and web sites- and have argued with them for years.
Yeah its only been two years.
I would give you a plus, except I disagree with a few of your points:
Everything else you say I agree with. I think I know where you are coming from and I agree with that. But living in a state that borders California (Nevada), we have to live from May to September with smoky skies and the powerfully strong smell of burning forests as California practices their unique brand of forest management. California is not like the East Coast.
“Producing wood just to burn seems a waste of resources.”
If you understood the reality of forestry- you’d realize that is wrong. In forests, the quality of wood ranges from extremely bad to extremely good. There is little or no market for the very low quality wood. For some of it, burning it is the “highest and best use”. If you don’t remove such low quality wood from the forest, you can’t grow better wood. That’s the reality of it- which I understand from 50 years of being a field forester.
It’s terrible that so much wood burns in the west- much of that wouldn’t happen with better land management- including forestry and controlled burning.
Looks like the perfect green energy business model, the wind and solar grifters must already be onto it.
The only green jobs that are going to be created in the future are debt collectors and subsidy application approval operatives.
The circular economy.
Step 1. Take government subsidies to produce overpriced electricity.
Step 2. Sell that overpriced electricity to a gullible public.
Step 3. Pay the investors a dividend for the profit on the overpriced electricity. Step 4. Go back to Step.1.
I think you mean:
Step 2. Force that overpriced electricity on the public, gullible or not.
That’s just silly,
for that to work there would have to be a built in inflationary component throughout the entire economy … kinda like a growing balloon or a great big expanding bubble.
6 billion for 4% of UK electricity computes to 150 billion for 100% of UK electricity. That sounds like an amazing bargain compared to all the solar and wind costs, onshore and offshore, plus it isn’t intermittent.
I wonder how much it would cost to generate sufficient UK electricity from nuclear if all the unnecessary hurdles were removed?
Nuclear is best used for providing a baseload and then adding other generation types on top. Pumped storage comes into its own as a rapid start plant that can provide time for other plant to start up.
Omigod not another Congo cobalt!
Wood pellets production boomed to feed EU demand. It’s come at a cost to Black people in the South (msn.com)
These green racist oppressors must be stopped.
So we cut down trees, which are part of the carbon cycle and “eat” CO2 to make pellets to burn that put CO2 into the air.
If CO2 is as evil as some (wrongly) claim, why?
‘According to DeSmog Blog, in 2023 Tory politicians received £48,000 in donations from companies connected to Drax. DeSmog claims Labour also accepted a lesser donation of £12,000 from Drax. Obviously I’m not suggesting such donations in any way influence whether politicians support Drax’s request for more subsidies.’
Politicians in the UK are actually pretty cheap whores.
US politicians on Capitol Hill charge much more for their political favours.