Drax’s planned datacentre could produce nearly double the emissions of all flights out of Gatwick airport each year by burning ۴.۹m 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 ۳۱۵ datacentres in the queue to connect to the UK’s electricity grid, representing ۷۳GW 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 ۱.۲GW datacentre, with ۱۰۰MW 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 CO۲ from the air when they are grown.
However, scientists and environmental experts strongly contest this accounting approach, with researchers finding such systems could take ۱۵۰ years to be “carbon negative”.
Based on information in Drax’s ۲۰۲۵ annual report, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) estimated that if built, Drax’s datacentre will require ۴.۹m tonnes of wood each year.
The campaign group calculated the total emissions from this to be ۸.۶m tonnes of CO۲ per year. This is based on an assumption that the datacentre would run at a constant rate for all hours of the year.
This is nearly double the total CO۲ emissions of all flights from Gatwick airport, which measured ۴.۷۹m tonnes in ۲۰۲۴.
Matt Williams, a senior advocate for NRDC, said this 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.”
The datacentre has not yet entered the formal planning process, however Drax said subject to it securing the necessary consents, it could be fully operational from ۲۰۳۱.
“The government must urgently set minimum standards for datacentres and rule out dirty energy generation like burning trees,” Williams said.
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There is growing pressure for more transparency over how these 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”.
“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,” he added.
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.”
