Drax profits up in green boom

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Rob R	Drax profits up in green boom Drax profits up in green boom
Falstaff	Interesting - Interesting comments too about wind farms and solar.
dpack	green they aint but they did have to stop burning metal rich petcoke with misbehaving scrubbers to get the green tax breaks.
Mistress Rose	I am not sure about biomass burning power stations. They often import woodchip from all over the world with the risk of bringing in more pests and diseases, and transporting bulky fuel, either coal or bio all over the world can't actually be saving much in the way of fossil fuels or reducing the carbon footprint. A way needs to be found to use the brash from forestry which could be usefully burnt, and often is on site.
OtleyLad	My gut feeling is that burning anything doesn't seem like a solution to preventing accelerated climate change. We should surely be focusing our efforts on minimising this. I know we have to burn stuff for lots of industrial processes but to replace burning of coal by wood to generate electricity just seems dumb.
Tavascarow	Shipping fuel around the world via the sea isn't that expensive in carbon terms. A lot less than shipping salad from Spain via refrigerated road freight. Boats are one of the most environmentally sound means of transport. The problem lies with the fuel source, as Ty proved with a link here weeks ago, it's not renewable plantation timber that's being felled & burnt but environmentally sensitive, species rich natural forest. So not very green even if they replant, which I doubt they are. Especially as we have vast forests of plantation timber with no use in this country other than amenity.
Rob R	Especially as we have vast forests of plantation timber with no use in this country other than amenity.

And grasslands. I'm beginning to think that perhaps biofuel would be a better use of the surplus resource.

Mistress Rose

GrahamH

Drax power station for all it's bad press is a wonderful piece of engineering.
I remember walking down the inside of one of the flues towards the bottom of the stack, the light was filtering down the 850 foot tall shaft and the faint illumination showed the roof of the flue ascending to about 90 foot to where it met the shaft.
With the silence, the light levels and the immense structures I was reminded of the interior of a cathedral.
From on top of the stack, looking down at the 375 foot tall cooling towers and the rest of the site was astounding and later, in the generating/turbine building, itself nearly three hundred foot high seeing the shaft that all the rest of the processes were in place for.
As a piece of engineering it works remarkably well and has adapted to the changes in fuels and legislation over its fairly long life. The largest power station in Western Europe, the tallest industrial chimney in the UK, started generating about 1976.
Hopefully Drax and it's like will be replaced by a green option but when, and by what who knows.

Rob R

I agree, and it makes a good photo, too Wink

Tavascarow

Using anaerobic digestion would be a good way of producing gas to power various things, but think you would need vast amounts of both grass and digesters to produce enough to run a power station.

Tavascarow, while we could get a lot of timber from unmanaged woodland, I don't think we have enough to provide for electricity generation long term. Getting more woodland managed has been an aim of the Forestry Commission for a long time, but most woodland is privately owned, so the owners either don't want to bother or wait until the price is high before felling. Some timber is virtually unsalable as it has got too big. We are using beech that was grown for making paper for firewood as there are no pulp mills taking new hardwood in the UK. The shut as the price of power was too high. I'm not talking about unmanaged woodland.
That's far to valuable to nature.
Although with sympathetic management they would be better for nature.
I'm talking about the large acreage of monocrop conifers planted by forestry commision. Deserts as far as natures concerned & low value timber.
I think the answer why is if people see how many acres of woodland Drax consumes in a day they wouldn't see that as being green.
Wont stop them from using more electrickery though. Rob R

Using anaerobic digestion would be a good way of producing gas to power various things, but think you would need vast amounts of both grass and digesters to produce enough to run a power station.

Yep, but it's going to oxidise any way, may as well capture the energy somehow. I think it's mainly maize they're using at the moment but I've heard, recently, of one taking grass. Tavascarow

Conifer plantation isn't as sterile as it is made out to be Taviscarow. In the north of England and Scotland it is home to red squirrels and pine martens. The pine martens are seeming to oust/kill the grey squirrels, so valuable in expanding such red squirrel populations as we have. I would also disagree about unmanaged woodlands. If you look at the flora of an unmanaged woodland it is very sparse as there is very little light below the canopy. We re-coppiced one acre that was mainly ash and hazel, and hadn't been coppiced for up to 50 years. From about 4 species we now have over 70. I am sure there are others, but with all the growth there, I couldn't get to all of it, and ended up with burrs in my hair as it was. We now get silver washed fritillaries and other butterflies in there. Insects attract bats, birds and other animals etc.

I agree with you about using sewage for power generation, and as you say Rob, using unused grass would also be useful, especially as where you are not grazing/cutting seems to do damage to the soil.

Graham, Drax does sound an amazing structure. When you look at the engineering of a lot of places, they really are very good. Pity that some of them are so ugly though like that 'Gherkin' shaped thing in London which always reminds me of a 1960s picture of a rocket, and the Lloyds building there too. We had a similar thing in Portsmouth called the Tricorn; built in the 1960s using new technology. It was cold and leaked water, the ramp up to the car parks was too tight and it looked awful. It has now been demolished, and instead they have the Spinnaker Tower. Again very clever, but only acceptable if painted white. I saw it before painting and it just looked like a lump of concrete. I worked at the other end of the scale and some of our microelectronics looked quite jewel like. alison

Agree the spiniker looks better, although it would be good if they could get the lift working. Mistress Rose

They have given up with it. There is no way it is ever going to work as it is affected by the wind. There has been another fiasco recently about getting sponsorship from Emirates Airlines and they were going to paint part of it red. Trouble is red and white is the colours of Southampton Football Club, arch rivals of Portsmouth. They have now decided to paint parts blue and gold, which are Portsmouth's colours. Then they discovered they had to get permission from the National Lottery as they got a big grant from them, but that was after 2 lots of paint had been bought. Seems the Lottery isn't going to take their money back now, but a total shambles from start to finish. Personally I prefer the view from Portsdown Hill, and you don't have to pay to go up it. Slim

I fail to see why their isn't an anaerobic digestion plant at every sewerage works. Recovering energy from s*** & making the by-product less polluting & with less heavy metal contamination actually a valuable fertilizer makes perfect sense to me.

There are a lot of large dairies here, and phosphorus runoff is a large problem. Anaerobic digestion has been found to be quite a positive in capturing methane potential, and limiting excess phosphorus effluent

http://www.greenmountainpower.com/innovative/cow/how-it-works/ dpack

supply

demand

still it is less toxic to the locals and their livestock than the molybdenum infested petcoke they experimented with as a cheap (5/10%)addition to the imported coal a few years ago Mad

I HAVE QUITE A BIT OF TECHNICAL DATA ON DRAX.but decided some battles should be avoided ,especially when dark forces seem involved,especially as to do a proper job would require a multi disciplinary academic team who would get blacklisted even if they could get funding for the initial overview study of such things as the strong correlation between wind direction and admissions to hospital with asthma and other lung problems,hypocurosis in live stock etc etc .

they have improved the scrubbers and abandoned the petcoke but i still dont like em much .

as to the biomass ,tis cheap and a good attempt at greenwashing. Ty Gwyn

as to the biomass ,tis cheap and a good attempt at greenwashing.

Any idea price per tonne into Drax or Immingham docks? dpack

less than coal per unit of heat at a guess Wink

dpack

ps but that might include the greenwashing tax breaks Ty Gwyn

Reckon the whole biomass project has been a guess from start to finish,and that was before reading them 2 links you posted Dpack. dpack

properly done it could be a decent component of a mixed source energy policy,the drax way isnt quite like that.

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