MPs Call For End To $2 Million/Day Subsidy For Drax Power Plant; It's "Sustainable", You See, Because Wood Pellets . . .

[hatrack]

Ed Miliband is under pressure from MPs to suspend subsidies worth £2m a day paid to the owner of the Drax power plant in North Yorkshire after court documents cast doubt on the company’s sustainability claims. A cross-party group of 14 MPs and peers have called on the energy minister to halt the subsidies for Britain’s biggest power plant while the financial watchdog investigates the company’s claims about how it sources the millions of tonnes of wood pellets burned to generate electricity.

In a letter, seen by the Guardian, the politicians said they were “deeply concerned” that Drax may have been given “substantial billpayer subsidy” while the company “may have knowingly and consistently concealed information” about the green credentials of its wood sources. The FTSE 250 owner of the Drax power plant gets about £2m a day in renewable energy subsidies, paid by consumers, on the condition it generates electricity from biomass pellets made from waste or low-value wood from sustainable forests.

EDIT

The letter was sent to Miliband after “explosive” employment tribunal documents revealed that senior executives at Drax had privately raised concerns about the accuracy of its public sustainability claims, after allegations that it was burning wood from some of Canada’s most environmentally important woodlands. The letter, signed by MPs and peers from the Labour, Liberal Democrat and Green parties, said: “We are deeply concerned that a company should be in receipt of substantial billpayer subsidy, currently guaranteed until 2031, while it may have knowingly and consistently concealed information of material relevance to its legitimacy as a subsidy recipient.

EDIT

The tribunal documents were made available to journalists after Rowaa Ahmar, the company’s former head of public affairs, took Drax to court alleging that she was sacked after writing to the chief executive, Will Gardiner, in 2022 to say that the company was “misleading the public, government and its regulator” about the sustainability of the imported pellets. The Guardian revealed late last year that forestry experts believed the company had continued to source 250-year-old trees from some of Canada’s oldest forests via the Burns Lake pellet plant as recently as last summer. At the time, Drax said it “does not source biomass from designated areas of old growth and only sources woody biomass from well-managed, sustainable forests”.

EDIT

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/feb/19/calls-to-halt-drax-subsidy-sustainability-doubts-wood-pellets

[bucolic_frolic]

1. Seems to me the only way to make it CO2 neutral

would be to burn dead wood which would decay over time naturally, and grow new trees faster than you're burning them.

The UK imports wood for fuel. That's news.

[NNadir]

2. The Drax plant is certainly not the only case of 3 card monty approaches to being...

..."green" nor is it even high on the list of the widespread abuse of the word, abuse now so common as to render the term "green" meaningless.

It does stand as representative as the abuse characterizing these claims, up there with things like hydrogen and sequestration and so on.

We aren't going to save the world by combusting biomass.

I'll spare everyone the rest of my usual rants.