Campaign group’s analysis of North Yorkshire plans finds datacentre would have to burn 4.9m tonnes of wood a year

Drax’s planned datacentre could produce nearly double the emissions of all flights out of Gatwick airport each year by burning 4.9m tonnes of wood annually, an analysis has shown.

Campaigners say this would make it “one of the dirtiest datacentres out there”.

Last year, the energy company Drax unveiled plans to convert part of its biomass power plant in North Yorkshire into a datacentre in response to the increase in demand for AI capability.

AI datacentres use a massive amount of electricity to power servers and cooling equipment, and to run facility systems. There are currently 315 datacentres in the queue to connect to the UK’s electricity grid, representing 73GW of demand. This is almost double the peak winter energy demand for the entire UK.

In public documents, Drax says it is developing options for a 1.2GW datacentre, with 100MW of this energy coming from the electricity grid and the rest from its own power station.

The Drax power station currently burns millions of tonnes of imported wood to create energy. This has been touted as a clean way of producing energy that could even result in “negative emissions”, as replacement forests take up CO2 from the air when they are grown.

However, scientists and environmental experts strongly contest this accounting approach, with researchers finding such systems could take 150 years to be “carbon negative”.

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