By Bruce Heppenstall, Plant Director, Drax Power Station
Drax Power Station has kept Britain’s lights on for 50 years. As well as playing a key role in the country’s energy security, providing enough power for 4 million homes, we have been a long-term source of high-quality well-paid jobs, too.
The site I manage in Selby is one of the largest employers locally and combined with our regional supply chains we contribute £358m per year to the economy of Yorkshire and the Humber. There won’t be a single constituency within the region where we don’t have some form of economic impact.
As the Plant Director, I am proud of this role that we play in supporting regional prosperity. We employ around 1,000 people directly at Drax Power Station and through maintenance, logistics and other activities hundreds of contractor colleagues can also be on site during any one week – increasing over a thousand during a planned outage.
However, our impact doesn’t end at the borders of Yorkshire and the Humber either. We are one of the largest users of rail freight in the UK and our biomass wagons take pellets from the Ports of Tyne, Liverpool, Hull and Immingham. This element of our supply chain also supports 2,500 jobs across the country.
Analysis from Oxford Economics shows that in 2021 the economic activity created by Drax Power Station contributed £735m to the UK economy and supported 7,130 jobs.
For some time, we have also been investing heavily in the workforce of the future. Since 2003, we have trained over 150 apprentices at the power station. We work in partnership with Selby College and the University of Sheffield to give the next generation the skills they need for long-term, rewarding careers in renewable power and delivering net zero.
We know it is important to get young people engaged in green skills early and that is why, through the Drax Foundation, we work closely with local authorities, schools and social enterprises to support STEM education and training on energy efficiency. We’re also behind an initiative to install LED lightbulbs and solar panels in schools to manage their energy costs and get young people interested in our industry.
The future of Drax Power Station will involve us continuing to generate renewable power from biomass but also adding carbon capture and storage and creating the world’s largest BECCS facility. We are planning to invest billions in this critically important carbon removal technology and up to 10,000 jobs could be created and supported during construction.
BECCS is vital because it provides reliable, renewable power to support energy security, while removing millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and making a significant contribution towards addressing the climate crisis – no other technology does both.
Drax Power Station has played an important role both regionally and nationally through our contribution to energy security, jobs and economic growth for the last 50 years. And with the successful delivery of our BECCS project, I very much hope that we will continue to do so for the next 50.
But to get there we need to secure the right policy support for BECCS from the next government. That includes rapidly launching the Track-1 expansion and Track-2 project selection processes for CCS and making urgent progress on the development of a business model for greenhouse gas removal technology. With these in place we can get BECCS operational by 2030, removing millions tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere per year while ensuring that local people can build their careers in skilled jobs at the heart of the green transition, for decades to come in Selby.
