Drax To Get £24m In Green Subsidies For Pumped Hydro
The title of this post is the same as that of this article in The Times.
These three paragraphs give details of the subsidy.
Drax will bank £24 million in green subsidies from energy bill-payers for its pumped hydro assets, ahead of a revival in the energy storage technology in Britain.
The FTSE 250 constituent, which also operates Britain’s largest power station in North Yorkshire, has secured contracts to provide 434 megawatts of capacity from its pumped storage and hydro assets, the largest of which is the Cruachan power station near Oban in Scotland.
The contracts cover energy to be delivered between October 2028 to September 2029, at a price of £60 a kilowatt a year.
This will arouse the anti-Drax lobby, but it should be born in mind, that according to Wikipedia, Cruachan can provide a black start capability to the UK’s electrical grid.
This is Wikipedia’s definition of a black start.
A black start is the process of restoring an electric power station, a part of an electric grid or an industrial plant, to operation without relying on the external electric power transmission network to recover from a total or partial shutdown.
After the Great Storm of 1987, we were without power in my part of Suffolk for two weeks and I suspect there were several black starts in the South of England.
I suspect that power from interconnectors could now be used.
Drax is expanding Cruachan from 440 MW to 1 GW, which will be a large investment and surely increase its black start capability.
So in this case the future subsidy could be considered something like an insurance policy to make sure black start capability is available.
The Anonymous Widower 
I worked on the “Duplication and Metrication” of Drax in the 1970’s, at the time it was the largest coal fired PS in the UK and I think 2nd in the world.
In 1974 I worked with architects were Farmer & Dark on the Isle of Grain PS which at the time was going to be the largest oil fired PS in the UK and again I think 2nd in the world. It was demolished in the 2000’s due the imposition of EU regulations.
Its interesting to see how power supply thinking has changed.
Comment by Martin | March 13, 2025 |
Had a great visit to Grain when i was events secretary for younger members of Kent IEE. Its was great stn at CEGB always looked after us access all areas. Blew my mind all that pipework and cabling all designed on drawing boards not CAD screens!!
Comment by Nicholas Lewis | March 13, 2025 |
This is capacity market payments and those assets have been receiving annual subsidies for years to ensure they remain available to the system operator in times of generation tightness. NESO is actually spending over a billion a year across all types of generation and its going up as fossil fuel generators are being forced off the system.
As an aside DRAX is an abomination but it was seen as good thing a decade or so back by the green brigade so the station got converted. The problem is its dispatchable generation and NESO is well short of that now so it has to stay till at least Hinkley C on line. The turbines and generators are over 40yrs old now but should be good for another 10 years given same technology that Ratcliffe ran for over 50yrs!
Ultimately though its our deindustrialisation that is keeping the lights on and letting our politicians say what a great job we are doing for the planet. Umm no its all imported from coal burning China with lax environmental laws in heavy oil burning container ships. Once we have to account for that we wont look anywhere near as good.
Comment by Nicholas Lewis | March 13, 2025 |
I see the Cruachan expansion has now been put on hold, though they say ‘the expansion could potentially go-ahead in the future, “subject to an appropriate balance of risk and return”‘. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5yly4x3gedo
Comment by Peter Robins | May 8, 2025 |