We rarely give electricity a second thought. It’s the lifeblood of our daily lives and we take it for granted – the lights are on, the microwave works and the computer is allowing me to type this.

Without a thought, we switch on the TV, the toaster and the hair straighteners, and just get annoyed when storms occasionally black us out or when the bill arrives.

Getting up-close to a conventional coal-fired generating station is challenging as the impact of the equipment’s size is visually shocking and in such contrast to the invisible electrons pulsing in the wires.

We are better able than most to understand this as Yorkshire is very much involved, and Drax power station, on the River Ouse, is the second-largest in the whole of Europe. It’s the most recently-built station in the UK (and hopefully the last) and produces the most carbon dioxide in the country and the most nitrous oxide in Europe.

It produces seven per cent of the nation’s electricity and is overpoweringly-enormous. The boiler hall is 250ft high and a quarter of a mile long. The 12 cooling towers are each almost a 100 yards across at the base, and it gobbles up 36,000 tonnes of coal every day.

Getting the sulphur out of the emissions from the 850ft-high chimney takes 10,000 tonnes of limestone a week, producing more than 15,000 tonnes of gypsum to make plasterboard, and there is more than a million tonnes of fly ash left when they clean it out. It’s a big bit of kit to allow us to leave the TV on standby and the streets illuminated.

There is clearly a significant environmental impact in providing us with electricity in this manner. The acid rain has been reduced by scrubbing the sulphur out of the flue gases, but apart from the CO2 from burning the coal, there is more associated with transporting it from Australia, South Africa and Poland, as well as bringing in the limestone and getting rid of the ash.

Co-firing of biomass and cheap petroleum coke was introduced to help reduce the climate-change emissions, though petcoke produces more C02 than coal.

However, the plan to cut climate change gases, by burning locally-grown willow and imported wood pellets, has been shelved as the Drax owners are seeking more Government subsidy.

Additionally, there is minimal progress in proving that carbon-capture and storage in the North Sea is possible, partly because there is little confidence that shareholders welcome the level of investment required.

Those who hijacked the coal train in 2008 had a point to make.