Enthusiastic young coders from Carlton Primary School’s Girls Coding Club were welcomed to the power station for an inspiring visit, focused on STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) education and showcasing the wide range of opportunities available to women in engineering at Drax Power Station.
The coding club, which was created in 2024 allows school aged girls to work on a number of tasks to encourage problem-solving, creativity, and collaboration with Lego SPIKE sets, which combine colourful Lego building blocks, easy-to-use hardware and an intuitive drag-and-drop coding language.
The ten pupils from the club were given the opportunity to tour the power station alongside some of Drax’s female engineers, and were taken behind the scenes to see how advanced technologies are used in the daily operations of one of Europe’s largest renewable power stations.
Jenna Snell, CBM Engineer at Drax Power Station said: “It was amazing talking to the girls about my journey into engineering — it’s important that young people see people like them in all different roles. Encouraging girls into STEM subjects will allow for the recruiting pool to be more diverse and ultimately the workforce, but what really struck me is how important it is that boys hear these stories too. Inspiring girls is essential, but we also need to challenge the expectations boys grow up with about who belongs in this industry. Real change means bringing everyone into the conversation.”
Nick Robinson, Drax’s Community & Education Manager for England, said: “The visit allowed us to showcase how we’re using technology to help run the power station, and how the women at Drax are contributing to that. It was great to see how engaged the pupils were, asking lots of questions and being truly amazed by some of the things we were able to show them. I hope they left feeling inspired to progress a career in STEM or another related subject.”
Their day began with a visit to meet Sparky, the station’s four-legged robotic inspector dog developed by Boston Dynamics. Rich Barber, Warehouse Management System Engineer, and Condition Based Monitoring (CBM) Engineer Jenna Snell explained how Sparky is used to help monitor the condition of equipment safely and autonomously, sparking questions and excitement among the group.
Pupils also got to step into the station’s immersive 360-degree ‘Igloo’ space with Graduate Engineering Apprentice Teagan Feerick, experiencing how virtual reality is being used to visualise complex engineering data. This hands-on session helped the students connect their own Lego-based projects with more advanced digital systems used in real-life engineering environments.
The visit follows the launch of the Lego Spike Coding Club at Carlton Primary School earlier this year, a pilot initiative by Drax to encourage more young girls into coding and digital learning from an early age. With only 29% of STEM professionals in the UK being women, and studies showing that lack of encouragement at school is a key barrier, such initiatives are essential to help bridge the gender gap.
ENDS
Notes to editors
Media contacts:
Kieran Wilson
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T: 07729092807
About Drax
Drax’s purpose is to enable a zero carbon, lower cost energy future. Our strategic aims are to be a global leader in both carbon removals and sustainable biomass pellet production, and to be a UK leader in dispatchable, renewable generation.
Our operations
Drax owns and operates a portfolio of flexible, low-carbon and renewable UK power assets – biomass, hydro, and pumped storage generation – which provide dispatchable power and system support services to the electricity grid.
We are the UK’s largest source of renewable power by output, and Drax Power Station is the UK’s largest single source of renewable electricity by output.
Through our pellet production facilities in North America, Drax is a leading integrated producer of sustainable biomass. Drax has 18 operational and development pellet production sites which will have a nameplate capacity of around 5.4 million tonnes once expansions are complete.
Drax supplies renewable electricity to UK industrial and commercial customers, offering a range of energy-related services including energy optimisation, as well as electric vehicle strategy and management.
Our future
Drax is progressing options for carbon removals using bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) technology globally and at our UK biomass power station. We are progressing plans to develop 7 million tonnes of carbon removals through BECCS by 2030.
In 2024, we launched Elimini, a US-based company to lead our global efforts to deliver carbon removals at scale. Elimini’s purpose is to remove carbon for good. To achieve this, it is convening engineers, environmentalists, communities, investors, and innovators to scale the market for carbon removals, with the aspiration of transforming our economies from carbon emitters to carbon removers. For more information, visit elimini.com.
