We did some maths to work it out
Drax Power Station is the eponymous power station of multinational energy company Drax Group, and it burns trees for electricity. More precisely, it burns concentrated wood pellets made from trees and imported from around the world.
In 2023, according to Drax’s annual report they burned 5.8 Mt of wood1. This is the mass of the concentrated and dried wood pellets, so is the equivalent of 11.6 million tonnes of green wood2.
According to leading Chirstmas tree suppliers, a Christmas tree weighs around 20kg for a tree3.
If Drax were burning Christmas trees, they would need to burn 11.6 million tonnes divided by 0.02 tonnes per tree, which is equivalent to 580 million Christmas trees in 2023 alone. To put this in context, there are 28.4 million households in the UK in 20234 so this would mean 20 trees per household.
Drax are looking to secure funding from the government to continue operation until 2050, which would mean the equivalent of 531 trees burned per household over the next 26 years.
Although we are not going to see Drax knocking on the door of every household to demand they deliver their Christmas trees for incineration, the reality is much more sinister. The energy company sources it’s wood pellets from around the world: owning and running pellet mills across North America and exporting them globally. This process is poisonous to the communities they inflict it on, with formaldehyde and other cancer causing pollutants pumped into the air they breath. In the Southern USA, these communities and predominantly Black and below the state poverty line. Drax is fuelling environmental racism5 and has breached environmental protections over 11,000 times6.
We pay for this, with £2m a day7 coming out of energy bills straight into Drax’s pocket. With Drax lobbying for further subsidies, this could mean £43.34 billion more8 or £1,526 per household.
We have to stop subsidies to burning trees for electricity.
- https://www.drax.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Drax_AR23_Interactive.pdf p72 ↩︎
- Assuming a 60% to 10% moisture decrease as quoted by the wood biomass industry, which means a round 1 bone dry tonne = 2 green tonnes https://ucanr.edu/sites/WoodyBiomass/newsletters/IG003_-_Woody_Biomass_Definitions_and_Conversions_Factors31510.pdf ↩︎
- https://dartmoorchristmastrees.co.uk/product/nordman-fir/ accessed 6 Nov 2024, see archive here https://archive.ph/d289t ↩︎
- https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/families/bulletins/familiesandhouseholds/2023 ↩︎
- https://unearthed.greenpeace.org/2022/09/26/drax-accused-environmental-racism-further-pollution-claims-against-wood-pellet-mills-us/ ↩︎
- https://www.thetimes.com/uk/environment/article/us-plants-supplying-uk-power-station-broke-green-rules-11000-times-2q559pwrg ↩︎
- https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/subsidies-for-drax-biomass/ ↩︎
- https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/draxs-beccs-project-climbs-in-cost-to-the-uk-public/ ↩︎