Drax Power Station

Drax Power Station, labelled as the UK’s largest power station, provides around 7% of the country’s electricity. Drax has been a coal fired power station for decades and a new large scale project is now underway to transform it into a sustainable generator, fuelled predominantly from biomass.

At present, four of the power station’s six generators are now burning biomass. Drax is set to become the largest generator of renewable power in the UK. It has kept its final two coal-fired units until now as a contingency, following energy supply concerns after recent world events that disrupted the supply of coal. Drax  is now converting the remaining two coal elements into combined cycle gas turbines alongside 200MW battery storage.

The final two generators are now being converted to biomass. Drax Power Station will use sustainable biomass, played a significant role in enabling the UK’s power system to decarbonise faster than any other in the world.

Another project is that a development consent order (DCO) has been granted for bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (Beccs) to be implemented at Drax. Beccs is a carbon removal technology in which flue gases are produced when sustainable biomass is used to generate renewable electricity. The technology also entails the gases being captured through a chemical reaction and stored permanently in deposits.

Alongside other projects on this live site, Billington Structures provided a new 225m long steelwork pipe bridge structure, connecting back to an existing frame at heights of 15-25m. In addition to this heavy duty structural steelwork, the works also comprised of open mesh flooring, handrails and ladders to form various walkways required for access.