Not even if they tried to tell me my own age.
The owner of the Drax power plant in North Yorkshire received record subsidies of almost £1bn for burning trees to generate electricity in 2025, a climate thinktank has calculated.
The company was paid £999m last year for generating about 4.5% of Great Britain’s electricity from its biomass plant, costing each household £13 a year, according to analysts at Ember.
As has been pointed out the actual emissions here are higher than if they just burned the coal the plant is built on top of. And, obviously, cheaper. But this is what you get when you allow lanyards to try to plan things.
So, hang the lanyards.
Coal is just digusting stuff that kills the planet! Trees, on the other hand are biomass, a nice green lovely material, so gaia rejoices when Drax operates. Unfortunately, because trees are uncompressed coal, you need more cubic feet of biomass to produce the same amount of heat as nastyevilcoal, and when you add up the emissions from all the nasty machinery the Yanks us to cut down the trees and chop them to little bits to desrve the label biomass, then add the emissions of the nasty evil diesel ships to get the biomass to Drax it’s all quite insane. And so makes perfect sense to Archbishop Miliband who is also quite insane
Obviously when the subsidies are reduced they’ll have to burn coal!!
Mad Ed has a lot to answer for, especially killing off North Sea oil and gas. However it looks like the Drax boondoggle started under Brown, or even Blair, but Cameron and the bunch of Tory duffers who followed him are absolutely complicit in not killing it off.
So, hang the lanyards.
They provide their own rope, which is handy….
They were going to offset emissions by launching deadly orchids from space and wiping out humanity, but 007 and Jaws had something to say about that.
Yes, I can’t help thinking the Drax power station would get an easier ride from the environmentalists if they’d changed their name to Green Tree Energy or suchlike.
Yarp.
Drax is one of my favourite Bond villains. Brilliant job by Michael Lonsdale.
Because he’s the ying to bond’s Yang. Bond is powerful because of skills, charm, love of people. Drax is cold, cruel and calculating. His undoing is that Jaws realises that this will apply to him and his nerdy girl. Even though Bond would fight with Jaws he would never needlessly kill him.
Moonraker is a bonkers Bond film but it has that going for it.
Drax has those dogs as well, and a real French chateau but moved to California. Super villain.
So if that 4.5% costs 999m, how much does the other 95.5 cost? Seems to me the claim is the 1/20th of a household bill is £13 so the whole bill is £260. My whole bill is… rather more.
Isn’t that just the subsidy bit?
Unless I’m mistaken working backwards £1bn @ £13 per bill gives the unlikely result of 76 million households in the UK. I know the census figures are bullshit but not by that much.
A more realistic figure of 20 million households equates to £50 per bill. If that’s 5% as claimed the average bill becomes £1,000 – still low and certainly below the price cap figures (possibly because the article only refers to the electricity element and conveniently ignores gas) but it’s in the right ball park.
Households don’t use all the electricity in the country. Non-domestic electricity consumption accounts for more than half of the electricity consumed in Great Britain (61 per cent in 2024) ONS, linked.
So if households were responsible for £390M of that £1B, at £13/household that would give us 30M households. At the official figure of 70M, we have 2.3 people/household; if the population is actually nearer 85M — which is what the supermarkets were estimating a few years ago — that’s 2.8 people/household. If you take people who aren’t in households (e.g. students, care homes) then you’re heading into the low 3s which is going to be about right.
Thank you. I didn’t know if the green surcharge was set at a similar level for domestic and non-domestic supplies..
What’s even better is part of the green surcharge goes towards subsidies for industries whose electricity costs are so high due to the green surcharge. You literally couldn’t make it up.
I am told that councils work on the assumption of 2.4 people per household.
Dunno if that is true or not.
oooohhh.. they’re using that fallacious Econutterism…
A centuries-old tree’s “ecological value” is exactly nought dot zilch, as it’s fully mature and basically just “cruises along” until it expires through natural causes or Man finding it and using it for its wood.
Its value as a ” natural circular carbon-capture device”, which the wood-pellet malarkey is based on, is net-Zero ( pun intended ).
You want young, fast, growth for that, which you then turn into pellets, which you then burn, etc…
The old tree *does*, very much, have economic value in its dense core wood for a range of construction purposes.
The less dense outer bits, the wonky knotty bits, and any parts infested by funghi would get turned into pellets since they’re *not* economically interesting, except as part of a large “CO2 Circular” scheme.
Which is far more profitable for those bits than simply selling them as firewood, or using it as such yourself..
So Great Old Trees will probably have gone into those pellets, as part of harvesting valuable wood, but that Great Old Tree is simply not the Magic Carbon Capturer the EcoNutters are utterly convinced it must be. ( “It’s *big*, so it must capture a Lot!!” )
It’s the same type of idiocy as “The Amazon Basin is the Lungs of the Earth”.
Those evil septics build their houses out of wood. Precious wood, plucked from the sacred environment to house billionaires!
As, allegedly, UK housebuilders are now considering, given the price of bricks.
Always been surprised by the build quality of US houses. A colleague showed me his place in Palo Alto and there was daylight through some of the wooden joints.
I recall seeing a video where a drywall repair had been made using compressed cereal boxes and then painted over.
If you scratch in the right place can you see the Honey Monsters eyes ?
Yes! The original printing/pictures were still visible on some parts.
The hypocrite multi-millionaire Dale Vince is, according to today’s telegraph article outlining his creative personal tax schemes, planning to build a new ground for his football club out of wood.
Maybe he should rename it Formerly Forest Green Rovers?
Quite so, Bart
If you want vegetables to capture CO2 you sow grass or do coppicing.
But it’s all bollocks anyway, due to Henry’s law, (I think it’s his) CO2 in air and water is in an equilibrium. So if CO2 in air declines, the oceans outgas CO2. and vice versa.
Funny you should mention that…. Because that only works for the first couple of cm of water, even with currents and Stuff. Say 50 cm… ( 20 inches for the Imperially Imperelled..)
The ocean has a *terrible* surface to volume ratio when it comes to exchanging gases.
And most Climate Models use exactly this concept. Even though it’s demanstrably wrong…. ( which makes it easy to spot the Stoopid Ones, which includes all the UN-sancioned/Scientific Consensus™ ones… Just saying….)
In reality the ocean, through some biological loops delaying stuff for centuries, and giving us that lovely oil, constantly belches out CO2, fuelled in large part by those lovely oceanic ridges.
It’s just that the terrestrial greenery, helped by the simple fact that the diffusion rate of CO2 in air is several orders of magnitude greater than in water, has become very good at capturing it as it becomes available.
There *is* an equilibrium… It’s just that the Sink end lies firmly on land, with the atmospheric CO2 pressure at an all-time low.. Low enough to have plants dial back on growing/multiplying because there’s not *enough* of it to go around.
Malthus does work… Just not as the DoomProphets scream about….
In a *really* weird kind of Fun…. The whole “Save the Whales” and other anti-overfishing/conservation efforts has *increased* ocean CO2 output.
Because all them fishies and cetaceans routinely cross inversion layers, and act as a transport chain for nutrients, including CO2…
But try to explain this to the average EcoNutter……
Informative. Thanks.
So… my answer to that one got into the Spam folder because…..
I accidentally used my real name™ creds for one post ( curse you browser updates before my 3rd coffee..) , used my nick for a reply and *dared* to edit for thumbfingered engerlish ….
CODEMONKEY!!!!!!!!
edit. seems to be sorted now. Thanks..
Yep. In the forested SE US, top soil is a few inches thick. In the Great Plains – grasslands – the topsoil is 20 FEET thick.
It’s hard to think of Drax as being in “North Yorkshire”. It’s south of the Ouse, very close to the boundary of that southern salient that pokes into Doncaster. It’s like when they talked about Kellingly Collery “in North Yorkshire”. Yerwot? It’s Castleford! That’s West Yorkshire. (looks at map) oh yes, the county boundary is 30 FEET FROM THE ENTRANCE!
That’s the difference between bureaucratic descriptions by London-based civil servants and reality. The North Riding (which meant “thirding”) was all north of York. Some idiot tried to split Yorkshire up into pieces ignoring the last millennium of history – hence the invention of “South Yorkshire” but even splitting that from West Riding left West Riding with a lot more people than (and less than half the acres of) the North Riding so the idiot chose to move a chunk into the North Riding so that it is now as far south as the banks of the Humber. Even looking at it makes me need a drink.
I don’t have strong feelings about “biomass” but I do object to subsidising it and to the bollocks of calling it carbon neutral.
They can’t hang the lanyards because the Tyndall Tree has been recycled for biomass.
Tyburn Tree
Lanyards also have that clippy bit that’s not strong enough to hold body weight…
Garotting still perfectly possible, but most people are incapable of getting that…..Personal….
Presumably it was specifically designed not to support body weight lest some outraged customer picked the wearer up by her lanyard.
Nonsense. Have you seen the size of her? You’d have to be a transvestite weightlifter to do that.
a climate thinktank
A wut? Climate maniacs forbid thinking.