For decades, generating electricity has been all about boiling water. Typically, you can boil water by burning coal, oil or natural gas or even through a nuclear reaction using uranium. That steam turns a turbine which turns a generator creating our electricity.
On a recent trip to the United Kingdom, I had the opportunity to see a Georgia product being burned to produce electricity for the British. It is something we may need to consider in our own state one day.
I visited the Drax Power Station in Selby, North Yorkshire. First opening its doors in 1974, Drax is the largest power station in the U.K., responsible for supplying around 8 percent of the country’s electricity. While the power station was originally constructed as a coal-burning facility, Drax embarked on a journey in 2003 to shift toward using renewable biomass as the primary fuel source for its power generation.
Today, two of the six units run entirely on biomass, and a third unit is running on 90 percent biomass. This transformation is remarkable not only for its scale – Drax has reduced its coal usage by over 6.5 million tons per year – but also for its technological breakthroughs.
The engineers at Drax achieved this transformation from coal to biomass with no impact to the plant’s generation capacity and almost no impact to plant efficiency. Today, Drax represents Europe’s single largest decarbonization project, and serves as an example of the important role that biomass can play in a diverse, reliable, low-carbon energy portfolio, while drastically reducing sulfur oxides (SOx) and nitrogen oxides (NOx) emissions. This change stems in part from the UK’s passage of the Climate Change Act in 2008 which established a rigid framework to reduce the country’s carbon emissions.
From Global Atlanta: https://www.globalatlanta.com/commentary-georgias-wood-pellet-exports-fuel-british-sustainability/