Britain's Drax has ended coal-fired power generation at its North Yorkshire power plant after 50 years, it said on April 25.

Over the past decade, Drax has converted four of the plant's six generating units to biomass from coal. The site near Selby in North Yorkshire provides around 14 terawatt-hours (TWh) or enough electricity to power the equivalent of five million homes.

Drax agreed with National Grid to keep its two remaining coal-fired units available to provide a contingency service from Oct. 2022 to March 2023. The units would only operate if and when instructed to do so by National Grid.

Drax will now start the decommissioning process for those units, it said.