The British power group Drax intends to stop using coal at its 3,960 GW Drax coal-fired power plant in North Yorkshire (United Kingdom) in March 2021. However, the group will ensure the availability of its two remaining coal-fired units until September 2022, when its existing Capacity Market agreements terminate. This shutdown is in line with Drax's December 2019 strategy to become carbon negative by 2030 by bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) at its power plants.
In October 2019, the company received government approval to convert three units of the power plant into a gas-fired plant. In addition, Drax plans to set up a 200 MW battery storage facility on the plant site. Commissioning is expected in 2023. The 3,960 MW Drax power plant originally featured six coal-fired units of 660 MW each, of which three have already been upgraded to run on biomass pellets.
Earlier in February 2020, the British government decided to bring forward the deadline for phasing out coal from the country’s energy system by one year, from October 2025 to October 2024. Coal-fired power generation in the United Kingdom has been falling since the introduction of a tax on CO2 emissions in 2013, from 144 TWh in 2012 to 17 TWh in 2018 (-88%). In 2018, coal only covered 5% of the power mix (2% in 2019 according to preliminary estimates), from 65% in 1990.
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