Walking in the Shadow of Britain
Transcript of Walking in the Shadow of Britain
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Walking in the shadow of Britain's biggestpowerhouseRobin Pagnamenta: At leisure with Dorothy Thompson
"Danger of Death! 400,000 Volts. Dorothy Thompson is unfazed. These are the boots Iusually wear to walk the dog, she says, almost oblivious to the tree-trunk-sized cable
overhead, which feeds 7 per cent of Britain's electricity supply to the National Grid.
Ideally, perhaps, she would be marching across the nearby Yorkshire Moors, within striking
distance of her weekday flat in York, but today the chief executive of Drax Power is at work
and the sprawling Drax site near Selby, where six giant turbines churn out nearly 4,000
megawatts of electricity, offers a rather more prosaic backdrop to a morning outdoors.
As she talks, Drax's 12 vast cooling towers, their rims encrusted with soot, loom large behind
her, monuments to Old King Coal, driver of the Industrial Revolution, bte noire of the
modern environmental lobby.
As a long-term fuel, it's hard to envision a world without it, Ms Thompson says. It's just
too difficult to replace. The UK shouldn't give up on its old coal stations too quickly.
But coal comes with caveats. Or rather one big one. Drax's furnaces gobble up ten million
tonnes of the stuff a year, a trainload every 45 minutes when running at full pelt and in
2006 the plant spewed out nearly 18 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, making it easily the
UK's largest single source of greenhouse gases, one of the biggest in Europe. Thus Ms
Thompson, keen hiker, boss of Britain's biggest power station and the only woman to head a
FTSE 100 power company, is intent on turning a coal-fired monster like Drax into a model of
clean, green energy.
We recognise that we emit a lot of carbon, but that does not mean we are not trying to
address it, Ms Thompson insists. There is a real recognition that we have to solve the
carbon problem.
Last year she began a programme to convert Drax's mammoth boilers to run on wood, straw
even sunflower husks and olive pipsas well as coal.By June 2010, about one eighth
or 500MW of Drax's 4,000MW capacity will be produced by burning this biomass,
injected into its furnaces alongside coal. Through this, and investments in more efficient
turbines, the plant is on track to cut its emissions by 18 per cent by 2012, she says. We think
biomass has great potential.
Ms Thompson's interest in timber goes beyond the purely professional. In her holidays, she
and her American husband are fond of hiking in the thick forests and mountains of the
northwestern United States, a striking contrast from Selby's smoking towers and the family
home in Islington, North London, where Ms Thompson's husband lives with their two
children and which she sees at weekends. My in-laws live in Boise, Idaho, which is just
made for hiking she says. We usually go there once a year.
This love of the great outdoors is unlikely to spare Ms Thompson the wrath of those
environmentalists. Sourcing the 1.5 million tonnes of biomass needed every year will be
tricky and critics argue that it could create as many problems as it is intended to solve.
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Much of the wood will need to be imported, for example, so how can Drax's chief be certain
that it is not being ripped unsustainably from forests halfway around the world? And what
about the carbon produced from shipping biomass to Yorkshire from Canada, Scandinavia or
South America?
The key for us was to develop a very robust sustainability policy. She insists that theprogramme is environmentally sound, although she is cagey about exactly where all of it will
come from.
This drive towards greener fuels may play well with public opinion, but there are hard
business reasons behind it. Drax, which made a pre-tax profit of 454million on revenues of
1.75billion in 2008, needs to adapt urgently to cope with tough new European
emissions standards. Under the European Union's emissions trading scheme, life will get
more difficult from 2013. Then polluters will have to buy all of their carbon-emission
permits, rather than being handed many of them for free.
By burning biomass, Drax is also awarded Renewable Obligation Certificates, which Drax'scustomersthe big utility companies are legally obliged to obtain for a portion of their
generation.
Yet there are technical limits on how much can be burnt before affecting the plant's
efficiency. In the longer term, carbon capture and storage, a commercially unproven
technology designed to strip out and lock away carbon emissions, could provide a solution,
but for the foreseeable future Drax will rely on the unmitigated burning of coal as its main
source of fuel.
Ms Thompson, 48, an LSE graduate and former banker who worked for Powergen and
InterGen before her 2005 appointment as chief executive of Drax, is under no illusions thatthis puts her at odds with the prevailing winds of political and public opinion. But she frets
that Britain's energy policy is leading us in a dangerous direction. Given its uncertain
economics and its inherent volatility as a power source, there is a limit to how much wind
energy can contribute to the overall mix, she believes.
With the public viewing new coal-fired power stations such as Kingsnorth, on the Hoo
Peninsula on the northern coast of Kent, as unacceptable and with new nuclear plants to
replace Britain's ageing fleet unlikely to come on stream much before 2020, power
companies are turning increasingly to gas-fired generation to meet demand at a time when
Britain is running short of its own supplies in the North Sea.
We are rapidly becoming totally dependent on imported gas, Ms Thompson says.
All of which means that, like it or loathe it, Drax is set to remain a critical piece of Britain's
power-generating infrastructure for years to come, providing reliable heat and power to
millions of homes until a more sustainable replacement can be developed.Moreover, right
now, its assets are being worked harder than ever as ageing nuclear plants are retired from
service and older, dirtier British coal plants are forced to operate under restricted hours to
meet EU emissions rules that will force them to close altogether by 2016.