New Reports Confirm UK Can Reach Clean Energy Targets Without Drax

Last year was officially recorded as the hottest year on record. Raging wildfires, stoked by strong winds and a preceding drought, have caused untold destruction in Los Angeles. Climate change is not in the future-it is very much happening now.

While LA's forests have been burned by wildfire, the United Kingdom has been burning American forests very deliberately-in its power stations. The UK burns anywhere between 5 million tonnes to 10 million tonnes of wood in its power stations each year. In fact, 2024 is expected to have been a bumper year for UK consumption of wood for electricity.

Many countries are trying to go fossil-free and reduce the role of coal, oil, and gas in their energy systems. To produce truly clean electricity, they need to go forest-free too.

The UK government has set one of the most ambitious targets: 95 percent clean power by 2030. Energy Secretary Ed Miliband published his department's plan just before Christmas.

Is this history repeating itself? In the 2000s, Ed Miliband MP was the energy secretary under the last Labour government. And when he signed the UK up to 2020 renewable energy targets, it drove the huge expansion in bioenergy we have today.

But this time around there are some differences:

1. 1. The UK doesn't need to burn forests to produce enough electricity. It is now known that by 2030, the UK can deploy enough wind, solar, battery storage, and other renewables to avoid having any bioenergy at all. In fact, a report by the University of Oxford showed that the UK could have enough wind and solar to power itself several times over.

   New analysis by Ember, published in December 2024, specifically analyzed the 2030 target and the much shorter time frame. It found that bioenergy electricity production could be slashed. And instead of this coming from large-scale power stations burning wood, any occasional use of bioenergy could come from a greater number of smaller facilities that could use more wastes or energy crops.

   In January 2025, E3G went one step further-its consultants Baringa (a consultancy also used by Drax in the past) found that by 2030, Drax power station would not be needed at all, especially if the government wants to achieve the lowest-cost route to clean power in 2030 (bioenergy is one of the most expensive energy technologies out there.

2. Bioenergy is not zero-carbon. Even if bioenergy companies added promised-but currently nonexistent-carbon capture technology, they would still be contributing to an increase in climate change. Any captured and buried carbon is more than outweighed by the impact on forests and their ability to absorb carbon as shown by two separate studies late last year. It takes decades for slowly regrowing trees to gradually offset this spike in carbon dioxide, by which time more trees would have been chopped down and burned.

3. Bioenergy companies may not be trustworthy. Since Miliband's last time in government, we have since learned that bioenergy companies are not be trusted, whether that is breaching environmental permits tens of thousands of times, failing to provide proper environmental data to the energy regulator, or appearing to privately acknowledge harm to primary forests that they were not owning up to publicly.

The UK doesn't need bioenergy, plain and simple. This makes the government's decision easy: Billion-pound subsidy contracts for bioenergy power plants run out in 2027, and the UK government should refuse to extend them. There is no point extending these subsidies when the technology won't even be needed by 2030, and burning trees in power stations can be reduced to a footnote in the history books of the Labour government.

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