Drax Power Station
Drax Power Station is a large coal-fired power station in North Yorkshire, England, which then became capable of co-firing biomass and petcoke and it now purely biomass-fuelled; its name comes from the nearby village of Drax.
It was the last of Britain's ten coal-fired power stations of the 1960s, built under the "large set philosophy"; it made use of the final leap-forward in generator-unit size (660MW), and infrastructure/building size. It was a "double-station".
1967-71 The power station was built; initially 3 generating units, nominally 660 MW capacity each. Architect: Jeff King of Clifford, Tee and Gale; consulting engineers W. S. Atkins and Partners
1974 The station was opened. It was operated by the CEGB.
1979-86 Units 4, 5 and 6 were built, bringing the capacity to 4000MW
1990 On privatisation of the Central Electricity Generating Board in 1990, the station was transferred to the privatised generating company National Power
1999 National Power sold the station to the AES Corporation in November 1999 for £1.87 billion (US$3 billion).
2003 AES relinquished ownership in August, after falling into £1.3 billion of debt. Independent directors continued the operation to ensure security of supply.
2005 After refinancing, ownership passed to the Drax Group which floated on the London Stock Exchange.
A co-firing facility was installed, providing 400MW of electricity using biomass co-fired with coal.
2008 Drax Power began a £100m co-firing upgrade project reducing the company’s net CO₂ emissions by one million tonnes a year by adding a further 500MW co-firing. The project was completed in 2012.
From 2013 a programme began to convert four of the station’s six generating units to use biomass as fuel.
2023 Coal-firing ended. 4 of the station's 6 units were burning biomass.