The chief executive of the power station giant Drax, Britain’s biggest single source of carbon emissions, has seen his pay rocket almost 70% to more than £5m after a year when high electricity prices sent profits soaring.
Will Gardiner, who has led the power generator since 2018, received a pay package of £5.4m for 2022, up from £3.2m for the previous year. Gardiner’s package included a 10% increase in his salary to £631,000, a £966,000 bonus and £3.6m under a long-term incentive plan. The total renumeration of the Drax finance chief, Andy Skelton, rose from £2m in 2021 to £3m in 2022.
The bumper payday is likely to cause anger from campaigners arguing energy executives should not receive large bonuses during the energy crisis as households struggle to pay bills.
Last month Drax, which owns the eponymous plant in North Yorkshire, posted an 84% increase in underlying profits of £731m for 2022, helped by £617m of taxpayer subsidies for burning wood pellets.
The company’s share price has soared as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine pushed up the wholesale cost of gas, feeding through into electricity prices, which are linked to gas costs.
Drax, which supplies up to 6% of the UK’s electricity, has faced criticism over the renewable energy subsidies it receives – down to £617m from £837m the year before.
Climate campaigners have accused Drax of greenwashing, arguing its biomass operations, which burn wood pellets to produce electricity, are far from green and can even increase the CO2 emissions driving the climate crisis. Drax’s annual report showed the company burned 8.2m tonnes of wood in 2022, primarily shipped from North America.
Matt Williams, a senior advocate for the Natural Resources Defense Council, and a campaigner for Cut Carbon Not Forests, said: “Every pound in pay rises for Drax’s bosses has come from subsidies on energy bills which struggling British billpayers have no choice but to fund.
“But the record profit Drax made in 2022 would have been all but wiped out if you take away the subsidies it received. Unlike oil and gas firms, Drax gets these subsidies because it claims to be green and low-carbon. But burning forests to produce electricity is anything but green: it’s bad for the climate, bad for nature and bad for families.”
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Nicola Hodson, chair of Drax’s pay committee, said in its annual report that the payout under the three-year incentive plan was “appropriate in the context of the response by management to the impact of the pandemic on operational continuity”.
Gardiner did elect to take a small cut in his bonus as the company said the number of injuries to its employees last year was “higher than the standards we set”.
Drax has also recently settled a pay dispute with workers in North Yorkshire and committed to closing its coal-fired operations this month, despite a request by the government to keep them open for another winter.
