Energy giant plots UK wood-fuelled data centre
Its owners want to build an artificial intelligence (AI) data centre on land next to the power station where it can draw electricity via direct connections to the plant.
Drax has been at the heart of years of protests from environmentalists because it is fuelled by burning wood harvested in North American forests and shipped to the UK.
It says this makes the power it generates 'renewable' – a claim contested by green groups, which accuse Drax of promoting the destruction of forests.
Will Gardiner, the chief executive of Drax, said the power station's current contracts with the Government, under which it has been paid billions of pounds in subsidies, will expire in 2031. As a result, the company is exploring alternative future revenue sources for the company.
'We want to see them renewed because Drax will be essential to the UK's energy security for many years to come,' Mr Gardiner said.
'But we are also looking at building a data centre on some spare land on the same site where it could source reliable green energy from our power station. We are talking to data centre companies ... It's a longer-term project that could be running by the end of the decade.'
He said Drax was exploring offering 'power purchase agreements' with data centre operators under which they would get 'renewable' power at a fixed price and could then claim they were environmentally friendly.
Mr Gardiner's comments coincided with the company's latest financial results, showing it made a profit of £281m after tax for the first half of this year, down from £463m in the same period last year.
Drax is currently crucial to the UK's power supplies. The plant, near Selby, generated around 5pc of the country's electricity in 2024 by burning 6.4 million tonnes of wood, equivalent to 27 million pine trees.
The site was initially built as a coal-fired power station in the 1960s and expanded in the 1980s to become the largest coal-fired power station in Western Europe.
When coal became controversial, Drax announced in 2012 that it would convert four of its six units to burn biomass. By 2018, the conversion was complete, creating what its owners claimed was the UK's largest renewable energy power station.
Last year alone, Drax imported 4.6 million tonnes of wood from the US and another 760,000 tonnes from Canada, with further deliveries coming from Brazil, Latvia and Russia.
It has only been able to keep on burning wood by also burning money. It has received £6.5bn of subsidies from the Government since 2002, mostly under the Renewables Obligation Certificate (ROC) scheme – a subsidy whose soaring costs led to it being closed to new entrants eight years ago.
Drax's ROC contracts are set to expire in two years' time but will be replaced by another set of subsidies from 2027-31 under which it will receive another £2bn, all paid for by levies on consumer bills.
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