Drax datacentre plan could emit nearly twice Gatwick flights' annual CO2, analysis says

Drax, the energy company, unveiled plans last year to convert part of its biomass power plant in North Yorkshire into a datacentre in response to rising demand for AI capability. AI datacentres consume large amounts of electricity to power servers, cooling equipment and facility systems. According to the report, 315 datacentres are currently in the queue to connect to the UK's electricity grid, representing 73GW of demand, 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 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 generate energy. The company has presented this as a clean form of energy that could even result in "negative emissions," because replacement forests take up CO2 as they grow. Scientists and environmental experts strongly contest that accounting approach, with researchers finding such systems could take 150 years to be "carbon negative."

Based on information in Drax's 2025 annual report, the NRDC estimated that if built, the datacentre would require 4.9m tonnes of wood each year. The campaign group calculated total emissions from this at 8.6m tonnes of CO2 per year, assuming the datacentre would run at a constant rate for all hours of the year. That is nearly double the total CO2 emissions of all flights from Gatwick airport, which measured 4.79m tonnes in 2024.

Matt Williams, a senior advocate for NRDC, said the emissions would make it "one of the dirtiest datacentres out there." Oliver Hayes, head of policy at the campaign group Global Action Plan, said, "Burning millions of trees to power server farms is indefensible." Williams added, "The government must urgently set minimum standards for datacentres and rule out dirty energy generation like burning trees."

The datacentre has not yet entered the formal planning process. Drax said that, subject to securing the necessary consents, it could be fully operational from 2031. There is growing pressure for more transparency over how energy-intensive datacentres will align with the government's legally binding net zero targets.

In response to previous reports that just two planned datacentres in Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire will have higher UK carbon emissions than ExxonMobil, Toby Perkins, a Labour MP and chair of the Commons environmental audit committee, said, "without the right measures in place, datacentres could represent a serious threat to the environment and to our legally binding climate goals." Hayes said the absence of coordinated government policy was an "abolition of duty." He added, "The only sensible solution at this point is a moratorium on datacentres until very basic questions about how many we need, what for, where, and how pollution will be avoided are answered satisfactorily by the government."

The government has previously ruled out issuing a moratorium on datacentres, stating that doing so would send investment and good jobs abroad. In Scotland, MPs voted in September to pause all new datacentre planning applications for up to a year until a national strategy can be developed.

A Drax spokesperson said: "The potential plans for datacentres at Drax Power Station can support UK economic growth as well as helping meet the government's ambitions for industrial renewal, in places like North Yorkshire, as well as AI sovereignty. NRDC are a long-standing anti-biomass campaign group and have no positive vision for our Selby site. Their inaccurate assertions are not independently verified and are rooted in basic errors regarding the international standards for GHG accounting of biomass and bioenergy and on the potential datacentres' power mix."