Drax power station in North Yorkshire is the biggest in Britain and, historically, one of its biggest polluters. However, the gargantuan site has now switched from burning coal to burning low-grade wood pellets sourced from working forests in an attempt to reduce its carbon footprint.

Although converting a power plant from coal to biomass has never been done on this scale before, two of Drax’s six units have already been completed, and a third will be burning 100% wood before the end of the year, at a total cost of £700m and with an estimated carbon saving of more than 80%. Additionally, the two biomass-burning units at Drax already generate approximately 12% of the UK’s total renewable-electricity.

According to Drax Group’s chief executive, Dorothy Thompson, it is a switch the company has been keen to implement for some time. She said: “We used to be the biggest carbon emitter in the UK, which we were not comfortable with. (But) at the time, it was simply thought not possible to burn biomass in a unit of any size that had been used to burn coal.”

Here at TrakRap, we think that this represents an excellent example of an evolution in energy creation, and a very encouraging start to 2016. Drax used to burn around 30,000 tonnes of coal a day; today it uses about seven million tons of biomass waste a year.