[margalabargala]

It's a biomass burning power plant. Biomass is absolutely renewable by any definition of "renewable". More can be grown on useful short term timescales.

Also, burning biomass does not affect the long term CO2 makeup of the atmosphere. The CO2 emitted was sequestered a decade ago, not 400 million years ago. Biomass carbon release is the normal carbon cycle of the earth.

[adamckay]

It takes decades to grow the trees that then absorb the CO2 that is emitted from the burning, and the biomass that Drax burns has been (and still is) imported from Canada from felling old-growth forests (some of which have been estimated to be over 250 years old), and this isn't even considering the emissions from transporting the pellets via ship, rail and road from western Canada to eastern England which is not tracked against Drax.

[margalabargala]

The burning is still part of the short term carbon cycle, and biomass is still renewable.

Boreal forests in particular lose carbon sequestration capacity as they age, and from a carbon perspective cutting them down for lumber is a good thing. Wood pellets are generally from the waste material, not wood that could be used as lumber for houses or whatever.

You can certainly make other arguments in favor of not cutting down old growth forests, and certainly transport using fossil fuels is bad, but "I don't like how they go about it and also they release emissions that I don't care to understand how it fits into the carbon cycle" doesn't mean they "aren't renewable".

The point you could effectively make if you so chose would be "renewable energy sources are not cut and dry always a good thing".