Drax Brand Guidelines: A Yorkshire Village Name, Twelve Towers & a Switch From Coal to Wood

A coal station on the Ouse, then a company.

The name comes from a village. Drax Power Station stands beside the River Ouse between Selby and Goole in North Yorkshire, and English Wikipedia says it takes its name from the nearby village of Drax. It was built by the Central Electricity Generating Board to burn coal from the Selby coalfield: two units were synchronised to the grid in 1973, the first three units were complete in 1974, and the second three followed in 1986. English Wikipedia describes it as the last coal-fired power station built in the UK.

Its silhouette is what most people know. The station has twelve natural-draught cooling towers, each about 114 metres tall, set in two groups of six to the north and south, and a chimney about 259 metres tall made of three concrete flues inside a concrete wind shield, English Wikipedia records. The turbine hall is around 400 metres long.

The company that now trades as Drax is younger than the station. After the electricity industry of England and Wales was privatised in 1990, the station passed to National Power. In 1999 it was bought by the American group AES; after a period of low wholesale prices, AES and Drax parted company in August 2003, and a restructuring completed that December left the business owned by a group of financial institutions, English Wikipedia says. Drax Group plc was listed on the London Stock Exchange on 15 December 2005 and is a constituent of the FTSE 250. Its headquarters are at Drax, near Selby.

From coal to wood pellets.

The defining change was the move from coal to wood. The station tested co-firing biomass in 2004 with locally grown willow, and English Wikipedia calls it the first UK power station to be fuelled by wood. In September 2012 the company announced that it would convert three of its six units to burn biomass alone; the first was running by July 2013, and a fourth unit followed in 2018. The fuel is mostly wood pellets, largely imported from the United States and Canada and handled through dedicated port and rail facilities and storage domes at the station.

Coal went in stages. Commercial generation from coal ended in 2021, and after keeping its last coal units available under a winter contingency agreement, Drax announced in 2023 that it would withdraw from coal fully and begin removing coal-related plant from the site, English Wikipedia says. In 2025 the UK government extended support for the station to 2031 on narrower terms: The Guardian reported in June 2026 that support would be roughly halved from 2027 by limiting the electricity that qualifies, and that the company had been ordered to use 100% sustainable wood.

The group grew around the station. It bought the electricity supplier Haven Power in 2009 and the business energy supplier Opus Energy in 2016. In October 2018 it agreed to buy ScottishPower’s pumped-storage, hydro and gas portfolio from Iberdrola, which brought the Cruachan pumped-storage station near Oban in Scotland and the Galloway and Lanark hydro schemes. It completed the purchase of the Canadian pellet producer Pinnacle Renewable Energy in April 2021, and its pellet plants now sit across North America. Drax says its mission is “to help meet the world’s increasing demand for secure energy, sustainably”; its website lists battery storage, open-cycle gas turbines, Flexitricity and a data centre at Drax Power Station among its activities.

How power producers present themselves.

Independent power producers sell something nobody can see, so they lean on the places that make it. Their websites and reports tend to draw on a familiar set of pictures: gas turbines in clean halls, cooling towers against a pale sky, the domes of nuclear stations, rows of wind turbines and solar panels caught at dawn, and control rooms where operators watch walls of screens. The plant stands in for the product.

Many of these companies also face households directly. In the competitive retail markets of Texas and parts of the Northeast and Midwest, a single generator may own several retail electricity brands, each with its own name and look, alongside the parent’s corporate name. Vistra and NRG Energy both present themselves this way, as a “family” of brands, and some of those names are older than the parent that now owns them: TXU became the Texas company’s name in 1999, Vistra in 2016.

A newer theme is the long-term power contract with technology companies. In 2026, World Nuclear News reported 20-year agreements under which Amazon Web Services and Meta buy output from Vistra’s nuclear plants, and such deals now sit beside data-centre pages and press releases in the way these companies describe their future.

The rest of the visual record is practical: community and safety pages, plant fact sheets, sustainability reports and investor decks built around capacity charts measured in megawatts and gigawatts. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — where it came from, who owns it and what it runs — and marks clearly where a statement is the company’s own.

Scrutiny, reviews and new assets.

Wood sourcing has been the subject of sustained scrutiny. In October 2022 a BBC Panorama programme examined where the wood in Drax’s pellets came from, including forests in British Columbia. In 2024 Drax agreed to make a payment to a redress scheme after Ofgem, the energy regulator, found that it had not had adequate data governance and controls in place when reporting the type of wood sourced from Canada; Ofgem said the breach was technical in nature and found no evidence that it was deliberate, that the biomass was unsustainable or that subsidies had been wrongly claimed, The Guardian reported. In February 2025 BBC News reported a further year of misreporting, in data for 2020–21; the company told the BBC it was focused on implementing the lessons learned.

The Financial Conduct Authority opened an investigation in 2025 into whether Drax’s annual reports for 2021 to 2023 misled shareholders about the origin of its biomass. On 18 June 2026 The Guardian reported that the FCA had closed it after almost ten months, saying it “did not find evidence that justified any further action.” In February 2026 Drax announced that it would reduce the Canadian biomass it burns and, from 2027, burn only biomass from the US, English Wikipedia says.

The group is also widening. Drax agreed in January 2026 to buy Flexitricity, a UK optimiser of flexible energy assets founded in 2004, and completed the purchase in April 2026, TheBusinessDesk reported. In July 2026 it acquired the listed Bluefield Solar Income Fund and its solar and wind farms, English Wikipedia says.

For a design guide, Drax shows how a company can carry the name of one place — a Yorkshire village and its power station — through privatisation, a stock-market listing and a change of fuel, while its identity sits alongside public debate about its supply chain. Compare Ørsted and Vattenfall, two other European generators. For this guide we use a deep river blue, a cooling-tower grey and a pale pellet beige with a plain sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Drax’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.