this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2024
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Biomass power station produced four times emissions of UK coal plant, says report (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 4 months ago by solo to c/climate
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[โ€“] ExFed@lemm.ee 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Yes, the reporting is incredibly lazy. Such is The Guardian's standards.

Drax is the largest power station in the UK. Assuming the figures in Wikipedia are in the same ballpark as the nameless report that The Guardian is referencing without citation, Drax has a capacity of 3.9 GW. Ratcliffe-on-Soar Power Station is capable of producing about 2 GW of net electricity. It's doubtful they're actually running either to capacity, but we can estimate that Drax produces roughly double the power as Ratcliffe-on-Soar. That means Drax is still roughly emitting double the carbon per watt.

It would be nice to know whether that figure includes biomass transport across the Atlantic...

edit: typo

[โ€“] theMechanic@sh.itjust.works 2 points 4 months ago

You said it, very lazy

I'm not familiar with how the UK decides on dispatching order for power plants, but if they follow a similar protocol as the US where is a combination of marginal cost and emissions, I wound in then expect that the bio-mass plant (with lower expected emissions) will be dispatched more often than the coal fire power station.

That would significantly affect the emissions/kWh

Finally, like you said we would need the transportation emissions and I would ask too for info on whether the source of the wood is a sustainable managed forest. If it is, that wood has near zero emissions as the forest regrows (except for processing emissions)