Drax completes £702m purchase of Scottish Power assets
Drax has completed the £702m acquisition of Scottish Power’s low-carbon and renewable assets from Spanish company Iberdrola.
The 2.6GW portfolio consists of Cruachan pumped storage hydro (440MW) in Argyll, run-of-river hydro locations at Galloway and Lanark (126MW) and a biomass-from-waste facility at Daldowie in Scotland as well as four Combined Cycle Gas Turbine stations in England: Damhead Creek (805MW) in Kent, Rye House (715MW) in Hertfordshire, Shoreham (420MW) in West Sussex and Blackburn Mill (60MW) in Lancashire.
The purchase of the new power stations, which was formally completed at 23.59 on 31 December, means Drax will now provide enough power for the equivalent of more than 8.3 million homes.
Will Gardiner, CEO of Drax Group, said: “As a British energy company, we are very proud to be the new owners of these critically important power stations across England and Scotland. For decades Drax has been at the heart of our energy system and now we’re going to play a bigger role than ever.
“We are investing in Great Britain by acquiring this portfolio of flexible, low-carbon and renewable generation assets. They complement our existing activities by providing very flexible power which not only keeps the lights on for thousands of households, but also provides crucial system support services to the grid, maintaining secure supplies and enabling more renewables like wind and solar onto the system”.
As well as the North Yorkshire power station, Drax Group now has a operations in Scotland, Wales, Lancashire, London, the East of England, the East Midlands and the South East of England.
Drax Power Station in Selby has converted two-thirds of what was Great Britain’s biggest coal fired power station to run on sustainable biomass, creating the largest decarbonisation project in Europe.
The acquisition was announced on 16 October 2018. Shareholders approved the deal at a General Meeting held on 21 December 2018.
