It is, says Dorothy Thompson, the Drax chief executive who wants to produce a whole load of our electricity from biomass, the forgotten renewable energy. While the country gets exercised about just how many wind turbines we might need to erect 7000 is one estimate, putting a windmill in view of any British coastal vista or visible on every Cornish and Scottish Highland horizon Britain's single biggest polluter wants to become the company that solves the green energy conundrum.

Drax is a company whose giant cooling towers in Yorkshire are witness to a British industrial heritage based on King Coal.

However, in the last five years since it emerged from a state of being near-bust, the now hugely profitable Drax has unveiled ambitious plans to become one of the country's biggest producers of the sort of energy call it renewable or green, or clean or carbon neutral which the UK has set itself to produce more of.

The Government used to have a target of 20% of energy to come from renewable sources by 2020; ministers now broadly accept that if we get to 10% we will be lucky. But fat on the profits of high electricity prices Drax should make getting on for £450 million this year and yet aware that producing electricity purely from coal will see it hit with huge environmentally-geared financial penalties, Drax has been investing in what it sees as the future.

It has over the last couple of years been using biomass to co-fire its plant traditionally stoked by the fruits of Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire coalfields.

By 2010, 500 megawatts of electricity will be produced from Drax's coal/biomass firing that is one eighth of the production of the giant Yorkshire power station, which produces around 7% of all UK electricity.

Armed with the insights of experience and technological advances with their partner Siemens of Germany, and in little doubt about how the financials work, Drax under Dorothy Thompson a sometime executive at Shell and Powergen has unveiled plans to spend £2 billion of City money building three new power stations capable of producing close to another 1000 megawatts burning only biomass. "We really do think that biomass is the future of renewable energy. It has been the forgotten renewable," says Thompson.

Drax's biomass plans would mean that as a company not only would it be producing 10% of UK electricity, it would also be on its own producing 15% of the country's renewable energy output should we get anywhere near having one fifth of our power coming from green sources. "The fact is biomass is very reliable. It produces quality electricity," says Thompson.

What she means is that biomass-fired plant is flexible and can be fired up to meet demand. Including maintenance outages, a biomass plant can run at 90% capacity over a year. According to industry data, the figure for a wind turbine, which is far more dependent on meteorology, is given at around 30%.

What constitutes biomass can be controversial. Hitherto Drax has been using "agricultural by-products" whether that is the wood chippings the timber industry cannot use or peanut husks or pellets made from straw stubble or sunflower seeds. Or specificially-grown energy crops like willow or miscanthus, otherwise known as elephant grass.

Drax says it wants to source as much of its biomass from the UK as possible, although it is no coincidence that the planned power stations are likely to be located on the Humber close to the ports of Hull and Immingham. And, of course, incinerating biomass is not carbon-free like, say, the wind or nuclear. In fact, biomass produces both carbon dioxide and harmful nitrogen oxides.

The key phrase for biomass supporters is "climate change neutral" that means the amount of carbon dioxide produced by burning it is offset by the amount of carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere when the crops are growing.

What biomass is, is our oldest technology for we were burning wood for warmth long before we were burning coal, gas and oil. The problem is modern Western economies are not geared either culturally or logistically to produce crops to be burned for energy.

Ultimately, Drax's biomass adventure is tied closely to the fact that if as a company it does not find some way of producing green energy, its financial penalties for producing carbon dioxide from fossil fuels will weigh heavily on profits and its shareholders.

For the UK, though, having a company prepared to invest heavily in an alternative fuel that meets "green energy" specifications and further diversifies our power sources can only be a bonus.