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The company behind behind the UK’s largest renewable power station is allegedly cutting down environmentally-important forests in Canada.

According to an investigation by the BBC’s Panorama team, Drax has bought logging licences to cut down areas of forest in western Canada.

While the company says it only uses sawdust and waste wood from the area, the BBC reckons otherwise.

It says Drax is taking whole trees from rare, old-growth forest in British Columbia and has satellite images, drone footage and eyewitness accounts to prove it.

Ecologist Michelle Connolly told Panorama the company was destroying forests that had taken thousands of years to develop.

Drax runs Britain’s biggest power station in Yorkshire, responsbile for burning millions of tonnes of imported wood pellets. Although strictly classed as a renewable source, burning wood pellets produces more carbon dioxide than coal, so it’s somewhat controversial.

But because of the renewable classification, Drax has received £6 billion in green energy subsidies.

Which, unfortunately, means the British taxpayers are indirectly contributing to the deforestation over in Canada.

‘It’s really a shame that British taxpayers are funding this destruction with their money,’ ecologist Michelle Connolly told Panorama. 

‘Logging natural forests and converting them into pellets to be burned for electricity, that is absolutely insane.’

The company told Panorama that logging at this site would reduce the risk of wildfires and also that it hadn’t cut down the forest itself but transferred the logging licences to other companies.

However, the authorities in British Columbia confirmed to Panorama that Drax still holds the licences. Drax later admitted to Panorama that it did use logs from the forest to make wood pellets, claiming they were species the timber industry didn’t want.

A Drax spokesman said: ‘Drax does not harvest forests and has not taken any material directly from the two areas the BBC has looked at.’

The full Panorama episode will air at 8pm tonight on BBC One.

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