Will Gardiner could scarcely be more different from his predecessor. Dorothy Thompson, who ran Drax for 12 years, was an energy industry veteran, known for her cut-glass accent and steely manner as well as for being one of the few female chief executives in the FTSE 350. Mr Gardiner, who took over at Britain’s biggest power plant in January, was born and raised in Manhattan and had not even heard of Drax when he was asked to become its chief financial officer in 2015. At the time CSR, the semiconductor maker for which he had worked in London, had just been sold to Qualcomm and he was considering his next move. “Lots of different opportunities came along, including a call from someone that said: would you like to work at a power station in Yorkshire?” Mr Gardiner, 53, says in his rapid New York patter in an office beneath the plant’s cooling towers near Selby. “I did my research. What was it that excited me about Drax? The first important thing to me was decarbonisation. The largest decarbonisation project in Europe, I really wanted to make a difference in climate change: that was something that appealed to me.” Drax can generate up to 3.9 gigawatts of electricity, supplying about 7 per cent of the UK’s needs. It was built in the 1970s to burn coal but, as climate change concerns increased over the polluting fossil fuel, Mrs Thompson began converting the plant to burn wood pellets. Burning biomass still produces carbon dioxide but qualifies for renewable energy subsidies on the basis that trees are planted to absorb at least an equivalent amount of the greenhouse gas. Environmental groups dispute its green credentials and Mr Gardiner admits that the science did not instantly make sense to him. “I had to do work on that and had to get comfortable with all the questions of sustainability.” Now convinced, he argues that Drax has a key role to play. “The wind doesn’t blow all the time, the sun doesn’t shine all the time. I don’t think batteries are going to be able to fill that whole gap for a long time.”
Times 16th June 2018 read more »