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Biggest English Polluter Spends $1 Billion to Burn Wood
More than two centuries after coal power helped forge the world’s first industrial economy, Britain is going back to burning wood.
Drax Group Plc (DRX) will spend $1 billion to turn the U.K.’s biggest coal-fired plant into western Europe’s largest clean- energy producer. The utility plans to convert one of the site’s six units to burn wood pellets by June, said Chief Executive Officer Dorothy Thompson. It intends to switch two more units to wood at a later date, investments that if completed will see it harvest a forest four times the size of Rhode Island each year.
...
Drax plans to spend as much as 700 million pounds ($1.13 billion) through 2017 upgrading its boilers at Selby, northern England, ordering millions of tons of biomass from around the world and building facilities to store the fuel, including four silos each bigger than London’s Royal Albert Hall, a 135-foot (41-meter) high concert venue with an 800-foot circumference.
The utility has hired farmers and foresters, designed special railway carriages and is investigating building wood pellet plants in North America, Thompson said.
While burning biomass releases carbon dioxide, the EU deems the technology carbon-neutral because trees absorb emissions in a similar proportion to what they release in burning. Opponents argue that it’s hard to ensure enough is being planted to compensate for what is burned.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-09-25/biggest-english-polluter-spends-1-billion-to-burn-wood-energy.html
Drax Group Plc (DRX) will spend $1 billion to turn the U.K.’s biggest coal-fired plant into western Europe’s largest clean- energy producer. The utility plans to convert one of the site’s six units to burn wood pellets by June, said Chief Executive Officer Dorothy Thompson. It intends to switch two more units to wood at a later date, investments that if completed will see it harvest a forest four times the size of Rhode Island each year.
...
Drax plans to spend as much as 700 million pounds ($1.13 billion) through 2017 upgrading its boilers at Selby, northern England, ordering millions of tons of biomass from around the world and building facilities to store the fuel, including four silos each bigger than London’s Royal Albert Hall, a 135-foot (41-meter) high concert venue with an 800-foot circumference.
The utility has hired farmers and foresters, designed special railway carriages and is investigating building wood pellet plants in North America, Thompson said.
While burning biomass releases carbon dioxide, the EU deems the technology carbon-neutral because trees absorb emissions in a similar proportion to what they release in burning. Opponents argue that it’s hard to ensure enough is being planted to compensate for what is burned.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-09-25/biggest-english-polluter-spends-1-billion-to-burn-wood-energy.html
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