Why are we burning wood in power plants?
The Drax power plant in England consumes four times more wood every year than all of England did in the mid eighteenth century! I came across this fact recently and I was prompted to buy the book More and more and more by Jean-Baptise Fressoz. There is much hidden in this single statement. Let us uncover it.
First of all, why is a power plant burning wood? The 3000 MW plant was built in the 70s and 80s as a coal burning plant. In the mid 2000s, in the interests of combating climate change, the plant was gradually converted to ‘biomass’. When I hear the word ‘biomass’ I vaguely think of organic kitchen waste and crop residue. Turns out it is not so. The Drax power plant burns wood.
In 2021, Drax power plant burned more than 8 million tonnes of wood. It got this wood from forests in Canada and the United States. The wood is cut using power tools, transported to the coast using trucks and then sent to England in ships. All of this uses diesel. Possibly this wood came from a commercial plantation that used oil based fertilizers and herbicides, sprayed from a helicopter, to ensure that the trees grew faster. If all this does not look very eco friendly to you, then you are not alone. According to The Guardian, Kwasi Karteng, the then business and energy secretary of the United Kingdom is reported to have said to a group of Members of Parliament (MPs), that
“we haven’t actually questioned some of the [sustainability] premises of it”
Given this, why is Drax burning wood? Under international rules, the UK does not need to count the CO2 emissions from this plant because burning wood is classified as sustainable. There is a sort of logic to this. The wood burnt could be a by-product. For example, If the wood pellets are formed from side branches from a tree where the trunk is used to make furniture, these pellets are in some sense a waste by product. In this way of thinking, burning these wood pellets is similar to burning husk from crops. On the other hand, there is no doubt that the revenue from these ‘waste products’ would make the wood for furniture cheaper.
Some day, I will do a deep dive into the sustainability or otherwise of biomass used for energy generation. Today, I will just note that in Europe when you hear that x% of energy comes from renewables, you may imagine this
But it is very likely that it is actually this
How much of the renewable energy usage in Europe comes from biomass? In 2021, Camia A. and others prepared a report on the ‘The use of woody biomass for energy production in the EU’. This is what they had to say
As can be seen, much more energy in all the years came from biomass and not from wind and solar.
Eventually, the Drax power plant would install a Carbon Capture and Storage system and the whole process of raising, harvesting and burning forests would become ‘sustainable’. There are many questions about this idea. The main one being that there isn’t enough land available for this strategy to work for the whole world. Also, this strategy can conflict with other environmental goals such as preserving biodiversity.
A few months back, BBC found that Drax was burning timbre from rare forests in Canada. Forests that have not been too much disturbed by human activity are usually much more biodiverse than human planted and maintained ‘forests’. In general, the tradeoffs between lowering CO2 emissions and other environmental goals is not recognised in Climate Change discussions. The money chasing low Carbon measures can shut all other concerns. And there is a lot of this money around.
The British government and electricity customers have subsidised the company to the tune of 6 Billion pounds till now. The subsidy stops in 2027 but Drax is hoping to get another chunk of money from the government to build a CCS system by then. What has all this money achieved?
The Drax plant consumed more wood than entire England in the mid eighteenth century and it supplies only 1.5% of the energy in England. This is one of Fressoz’s main points in his book. When people talk about energy transition, they look at the percentage of energy consumed from different sources. These charts tell a neat little story of wood being replaced by coal which in turn is replaced by oil and so on. Fressoz shows that this is just false. What actually happens is that new energy sources get added to the existing ones. No old source is replaced. There is no transition in that sense.
Fressoz buttressed his point in the podcast by pointing out that there are only six raw materials whose consumption by humans has reduced. There is no transition. Only more and more consumption. Fressoz is a neo Malthussian and believes that degrowth is the only answer. For a counterpoint, I would recommend this podcast. In it the investor / philosopher Naval points out that there is no raw material that humanity has run out of and we are only limited by knowledge. You can agree with Frissoz or Naval. Or you can be intellectually lazy and make the meaningless statement that ‘the truth is somewhere in the middle’.
Either way, it would be useful to appreciate the facts as they are. When the European Union talks of renewables more than 50% of them might be coming from biomass. The practice of burning biomass may or may not be sustainable but it is definitely in conflict with other environmental goals such as biodiversity. Also, this practice is not cheap for the countries practising it. And finally, humanity’s need for energy is not going to go down any time soon. Any discussion on climate change should not ignore these realities.
The facts in this article are mainly from the book More and more and More unless otherwise stated.
This story is part of a series called ‘Electricity deep dive’. Hit the envelope icon on Medium and get my writing delivered to your Inbox.
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