Design and Specification
The station's main buildings are of steel frame and metal clad construction. The main features of the station consists of a turbine hall, a boiler house, a chimney and twelve cooling towers. The station's boiler house is 76 m (249 ft) high, and the turbine hall is 400 m (1,300 ft) long. The reinforced concrete chimney stands at 259 metres (850 ft) high, with a diameter of 9.1 metres (30 ft), and weighs 44,000 tonnes. It consists of three flues, each serving two of the station's six boilers. When finished, the chimney was the largest industrial chimney in the world, and is still the tallest in the United Kingdom. The twelve 114 metres (374 ft) high natural draft cooling towers stand in two groups of six to the north and south of the station. They are made of reinforced concrete, in the typical hyperboloid design, and each have a base diameter of 92 m (302 ft). Other facilities on the site include a coal storage area, flue gas desulphurisation plant and gypsum handling facilities.
Drax power station is the second largest coal-fired power station in Europe, after Bełchatów Power Station in Poland. Drax produces around 24 terawatt-hours (TWh) (86.4 petajoules) of electricity annually. Although it generates around 1,500,000 tonnes of ash and 22,800,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide each year, Drax is the most carbon-efficient coal-fired powerplant in the United Kingdom.
Read more about this topic: Drax Power Station
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