ROSS CLARK: This polluting green sham has been mocking taxpayers for years
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.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Just like all of the Green scams , they only work with massive , [ often well hidden } subsidies .
The last time I looked . Tesla turned a $750 million car business loss per year , into a profit after one point five $Billion subsidy .
I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!
Casablanca
The gamble was by the government, which set the unworkable terms for the CFD. They lost, but fortunately on this occasion it was not at the expense of consumers. Drax did not operate its unprofitable CFD. The supply that replaced it was almost certainly cheaper than the price they would have needed to run at a profit even absent the CFD, and massively so given the way the CFD actually works.
We did of course lose out on dishing out ROCs to the other 3 Drax biomass units on top of market prices. That’s the real financial scandal here, and has been for years.
I don’t mind a parasite. I object to a cut-rate one. (to Ugarte), one of my favourite lines
The media is finally turning – because it suits them.
It’s welcome today, but it’s exposed more than ever before their unreliable nature. They will support whichever side they think is ‘winning’.
NetZero watch has struggled to find media articles condemning NetZero over the past couple of years. Today it’s a daily list of maybe ten media articles exposing what’s going on.
NetZero in the UK is dying a long painful death. It will take a generation to recover from this nonsense but, recover from it we will.
Let us be grateful for at least one power station that generates dispatchable energy using a feedstock from a politically stable country (as we were last year during the energy crisis). The carbon imbalance between burning and regrowing wood has its counterpart in all methods of energy production – coal, oil, gas, nuclear, wind, solar – with embedded energy of plant and transport, and upgrading a high entropy source to a state fit for energy extraction. You can’t fight the second law!
Okay, the profit gouging and greenwashing is reprehensible but that is also pervasive and as much the fault of society allowing itself to be gulled by catastrophists and zealots as their fellow travellers in the utilities.
Even if Drax was a large net CO2 emitter – who cares? None of us here should be bothered by a dose of “God’s Gas”.
Many in USA not happy with the tree felling regime, not just eco-loons I believe. (see October 3, 2022 post here and WUWT)
https://theecologist.org/2018/apr/16/hardwood-forests-cut-down-feed-drax-power-plant-channel-4-dispatches-claims
So actually it would be much better if Drax returned to burning the coal it is practically sitting on. But our intellectually challenged Govt thought it was much better or “greener” to subsidise Drax to import wood pellets from the USA. If Drax had not done that, it would have been shut down and blown up, with a Govt Minister standing by and gleefully cheering.
Yes, it would be good to reinstate coal fired power stations but I’d still leave Drax on woodchips for the sake of diversity. British coalminers were not always a reliable ally.
@Max Beran.
“British coalminers were not always a reliable ally.”
Nonsense, coalminers could have brought down the Thatcher government down in 1982 & during the 1984/85 mines strike the mines who worked in coalminers that were next door to coal power stations especially in the Midlands didn’t join the strike if they had done its likely there would have being rota disconnections in the 1985 winter.
Many thought Arthur Scargill was unhinged and foolish to call a strike without a vote and to do so in March as well as his arrogance to any advice such as stopping the strike in September when it was clear it would cause a conflict between the government and CEGB due to the bill for all that heavy fuel oil it burnt instead of coal without raising electricity prices & they would probably act differently in a future strike.
Coalminers generally prescribed to traditional methodist Labour party values and just wanted the best for their family and were aspirational particularly for their children and didn’t want to be pawns in some kind anti-British militancy plot. They also expected coal would be being replaced by something better in the 1960s which would have being the case if the nuclear power program wasn’t sabotaged and we didn’t discover natural gas in the North sea. Wilson closed more mines than Thatcher after all but there were other opportunities to coal mining at the time.
“I’d still leave Drax on woodchips for the sake of diversity”
Diversity of opinion + Diversity in prototypes yes but diversity for diversity sake is not necessary here or in general what we need to do is focus on what we actual need is fuel security so 1 year+ worth of fuel stockpiled and equipment reliability which could be meet by a grid 100% coal or nuclear powered.
Also would you be keeping the subsidies?
Then burning the coal from the mine next to Drax (which could be 5% of GB electricity) is also money not going to our balance of payments problem.
Drax aims to get its snout into the massive carbon capture trough too…
https://www.cityam.com/drax-locked-in-talks-with-uk-government-over-2bn-carbon-capture-project/
That’s much more worrying, although baseload CFDs clearly don’t work. Getting a licence to pour money down a hole would be truly insulting.
But Drax is a business and you can’t really blame it for taking advantage of all the green subsidies that the Govt is happy to hand out. The Govt appears not to care about the costs and stability of the energy supply, as long as they can virtue signal their “greenness”, and claim to be “saving the planet”.
‘Are we really surprised that the operators of Drax power station deprived taxpayers of £639million last year by – legally – gaming the subsidy system?’
A head fake worthy of the restart of NFL football. Jets vs Browns. Tonight.
Drax isn’t the bad guy; your government is. Drax is just following what the government set up.
Ross won’t declare that his government is evil.
Exactly. When governments offer people free money, people take it. The solution isn’t to hope all people become angels but to stop governments offering free money. Green schemes have used taxpayers money to hide their true cost for years, because politicians know we would object to higher prices but acquiesce to higher taxes.
Some of the major players aren’t even British companies.
In reality it is the CFD scheme that is at fault here. I’ve already pointed out what was happening and why previously:
Drax and Lynemouth power stations stopped running their CFD funded units when their subsidies turned into taxes.
The green line is the baseload “market” price that their CFDs are benchmarked against. The CFD prices are the yellow and light blue lines. You can see that as the Baseload Market Reference Price got close to the CFD strike prices they started to cut running hours: the subsidy no longer covered costs unless actual market prices for power were high enough. Last winter the BMRP was £405/MWh, based on forward trading for the winter conducted in the summer when we had a massive price spike. The result is that these plants have shut down. Only the extremely high peak prices during cold snaps or supply crises result in plant startup.
The units that are subsidised via ROCs continue to operate normally, because the ROC subsidy on top of elevated market prices gives a very handsome profit.
The BMRP is not fit for purpose: it is based on assessments by London electricity brokers of season ahead baseload prices – without even trades necessarily taking place. Baseload has been very costly – and barely traded – because of the shortages of French nuclear power.
However, if we assume that Drax had managed to sell winter power forward at £405/MWh, so that its CFD “tax” was covered, what would have happened? Retailers who bought would have paid £405/MWh, on which they stood to make massive losses, as power prices were much lower when it came to reality. Meanwhile Drax (and Lynemouth) would have the option to procure alternative supply at market prices to feed their pricey sales, pocketing the difference a trading profit. Day ahead prices averaged about £130/MWh over the winter, so that would have been £275/MWh of profit – and £275/MWh of loss for the retailer, to be passed on to us in our bills.
Since Drax didn’t actually make the forward sales it was the retailers who got to buy at the lower prices that actually prevailed, saving a large chunk on our bills. Just under £639m of savings (since the £639m is calculated against the strike price of £126/MWh, rather than the market average of £130/MWh). Drax did consumers an accidental favour.
It would make no sense for Drax to run the plant and incur the CFD “tax”, especially since the underlying profitability at the strike price was marginal at best and probably loss making. The reality is that CFDs that do not offer an adequate return will lead to plant shutting down, through bankruptcy if the contracts attempt to force them to run. There is no point in running at a loss. Those designing CFDs didn’t think them through and test out what happens in different circumstances.
Much of my retirement income comes from Vanguard Mutual Funds. (Social Security is actually the largest source.) A small part of DRAX Group is held by Vanguard, and a miniscule portion is in my name.
The Group is cutting North American forests, so I do not feel guilty about this arrangement. I have been saying, for years, STOP. No one pays any attention, least of all DRAX.
In my experience, most, if not all, renewable energy companies are gaming the system set up by Chris (get me out of jail) Huhne and Ed (Mr Potato) Davey. Successive ministers have only made the system worse. A system that can be gamed attracts all sorts of nasty people.
I recall that this scam of declaring wood burning to be carbon neutral was set up by the EU so they could virtue signal their world-leading green credentials. We, being part of the EU then, obeyed their bidding. It was all a big con.
The whole EU can best be summarised as a big con
BUT…. who should we really point the finger at, those who game a system put together by morons or the morons themselves. True I am sure some cosy relationships were on offer which created a system ripe for exploitation. Like everything else to do with the climate scam the rule makers are making it up as they go along pretending to preserve order when in fact they produce the complete opposite.
BUT…. who should we really point the finger at, those who game a system put together by morons or the morons themselves. True I am sure some cosy relationships were on offer which created a system ripe for exploitation. Like everything else to do with the climate scam the rule makers are making it up as they go along pretending to preserve order when in fact they produce the complete opposite.
Has everyone forgotten that “Dr.” Rebecca Heaton, Head of Climate Change at Drax, actually sat for over four years, on the Guvmint’s “Independent” Climate Change Committee? The bunch of crooks and activists headed up by “Lord” Deben (formerly Selwyn Gummer of feeding beefburgers to his daughter during the BSE “Crisis” fame.)
The CCC was set up as part of Ed Miliband’s Climate Change Act 2008 and tells more lies than the Grauniad.
How appropriate that Drax had a senior executive on the CCC! No possible Conflict of Interest there, just like Deben himself who was raking in hundreds of thousand for his amazing “advice” to Ruinable Energy Companies. All open and above board! Just like the Guvmint’s “mates” Contracts for supplying masks during the Covid scam.
Drax has also received hundreds of millions previously on Carbon Capture and Storage boondoggles in the past and our Beloved Leaders even today proudly promise to throw Billions more, borrowed or stolen from taxpayers or electricity users, down the same black hole! All very cosy for the crooks and their political chums.
Not quite as cosy for a pensioner stuck in a flat somewhere, deciding whether to eat or heat.
Just a little quibble with Ross’s piece. He talks about Drax’s flues belching out Sulphur and Nitrogen Oxides. To a trivial extent that may be true. But don’t forget that before the CEGB was privatised, Drax was one of the “lucky” thermal Power Stations that had been provided with full Flue Gas Desulphurisation, again costiong hundreds of Millions, to combat the “Acid Rain” boondoggle. And thus operated and still operates under lighter regulatory restrictions. Unless they have been allowed to not bother with it, of course.
A long saga of corruption and incompetence at its finest.
Who could forget Rebecca “BECCS” Heaton? She sold the idea to the CCC that CCS at Drax would be carbon negative, rather than an enormously costly boondoggle that would use up many more trees to generate the same amount of power.
Why she left the CCC:
https://www.ft.com/content/d3b94876-7900-4e6b-a900-75d682f2f7f0
“The head of climate change at power group Drax has stepped down from a position on the UK’s climate advisory committee, months after a potential conflict of interest was flagged by a member of the House of Lords. Heaton’s position on the committee was called into question by Lord John Randall, the environment adviser to former UK prime minister Theresa May.
In March, Randall wrote to the National Audit Office, a watchdog, to flag that “there may be a real or perceived conflict between [Heaton’s] role with Drax and her ability to offer impartial expert advice on such policies”.
Where she went: https://www.ovoenergy.com/ovo-newsroom/press-releases/2021/july/ovo-energy-appoints-dr-rebecca-heaton-as-new-director-of-sustainability.html
No such conflict of interest worries about Baroness Brown, She has been on the Climate Change Committee since it started in 2008, and in 2017 was appointed as chair of the Adaptation sub-committee.
In March 2021 she joined the Board of Ørsted, major wind turbine manufacturer and in line for lucrative offshore wind contracts as Boris aimed to make the UK the “Saudi Arabia” of wind. https://renews.biz/66254/orsted-to-anoint-king-as-new-board-member/
“Ørsted board of directors chairman Thomas Thune Andersen said “She possesses a deep knowledge of renewable energy and government policy perspectives from positions, among others, as member of the Committee on Climate Change and non-executive director of the Green Investment Bank.”
In other words she was appointed for her inside knowledge of government policy, which she is instrumental in recommending via her position on the climate change committee, which shows her still as chair of the Adaptation sub-committee. https://www.theccc.org.uk/about/
However, her position (bringing in a miserly £40K a year) is shown in her HoL register of interests, so that’s OK then.
First, I am very happy that Drax is still there producing electricity on demand, not just when the wind blows.
Equally I deeply regret the stupidity of not burning coal and gas but importing wood from America, CO2 is CO2 whether it comes directly from living trees or from 400 million year old trees.
Third, at last the anti-green reaction is emerging. The power of Democracy is that in the end the reasonabilty of us, the people, wins. Keep increasing the pressure of our sense against the Whitehall Oxford PPE clots in camouflage. I look forward to us getting this mess back on the straight and narrow again, back to the fifties and sixties style economics, good old Keynes.
Drax was allowed to continue because it burnt wood instead of coal and hence greatly increased the “green” electricity figures.
This was always a scam but at least it means we still have available a coal powered plant which has not yet been explosively demolished by the President of COP26 as he did for Ferrybridge in this 2021 official SSE video :
https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/1429456184902393858/pu/vid/720×720/JwPnpycxEiyBmqVJ.mp4?tag=12
So that when the riots start over the inevitable blackouts that are coming as a result of Net Zero policies we will have at least one coal-fired power station available. Unless of course the Net Zero zealots get to it first.
Four men died when Didcot power station was demolished:
https://www.constructionnews.co.uk/civils/didcot-seven-years-on-no-answers-no-lessons-no-justice-21-02-2023/
“The men were part of a team employed by specialist Coleman & Company, working to bring down a building on the iconic Didcot Power Station in Oxfordshire.
The coal and gas-fired facility was built in the 1960s, but was decommissioned by RWE nPower in early 2013, as part of a shift away from carbon-heavy electricity generation and with a view to selling the land for redevelopment.
After local campaigners failed in a bid to get English Heritage to list the imposing 98-metre-tall cooling towers, work began on demolishing the structures.
Coleman & Company successfully brought three of those down in the summer of 2014, then moved on to other areas of the site, including the boiler house.
The 10-storey high, 100-metre-long building was being prepared for demolition through a process that involved cutting its steel legs to weaken them. Explosives were then meant to bring it down.
At around 4pm on 23 February 2016, a week and a half before the scheduled demolition date, part of the building collapsed.
Mick Collings was found dead shortly afterwards. The bodies of Ken Cresswell, Chris Huxtable and John Shaw were not recovered for months – something that still upsets and confuses the families.”
Can we change the title of that video clip John? Suggest
‘Alok commits treason in 7 seconds’
Pathetic governments set up these ridiculous schemes and leave huge loopholes into which industry will stick their arms and pull out £millions, which they are duty bound to do to maximise shareholder returns.
some seriously comical BBC Climate catastrophe p*ss taking
Surely Ross Clark should know that C02 is NOT a pollutant. It is invisible and odourless, so any smoke rising from cooling towers is not C02. It’s also a trace element in the atmosphere, only 4% of all greenhouse gasses, against 90% water vapour. To blame C02 for global warming is ludicrous. There are several laws of physics which deem it impossible.