Coal Powerstations and Cooling Towers

8th May

East Yorkshire has an abundance of coal powerstations with Eggborough, Ferrybridge and Drax to name but a few. Drax is by far the largest coal powerstation in the UK and is listed as the 23rd most dirty powerstation in the world, emitting over 23 million tons of CO2 per year. The findings are revealed in a huge survey of the CO2 emissions from 50,000 power plants worldwide by the Centre for Global Development (CGD) an independent think-tank based in the US.

Leaving Wakefield we headed east along the M62 first coming across Ferrybridge. This gave me an opportunity to take a photo of the powerstation as we drove along the motorway but there was no good vantage point to set up the tripod so we continued eastwards.

Eggborough is set quite a way from the motorway and is surrounded by houses so we bypassed this and continued on to Drax.

Drax is named after a small village and is surrounded by agriculture. The fields backing up to Drax were a brilliant yellow of oilseed rape (Drax is now burning a percentage of oilseed rape in an attempt to reduce its CO2 emissions) this provided an excellent foil against which to photograph the power station.

It is unfortunate that the powerlines cut across the images of the cooling towers with the road in the foreground. It is for this reason that I have not used them.

Driving nearer to the powerstation I set up the tripod and made three bracketed shots of the cooling towers with a view to doing a HDR image. There was a great deal of contrast and I thought it would be ideal for this type of image. The top image of the cooling towers is the end result after converting the three images to HDR.