Dorothy Thompson is not typical of a power station chief executive. For a start, she lives in Islington.

Mrs Thompson, who freely admits knowing little about coal or engineering, was drafted in to run Drax in 2005 by Gordon Horsfield, the former chairman. Despite coming to the industry via project finance rather than the traditional engineering route, she is unperturbed that she is the first female boss of a FTSE 100 company in the power sector. In fact, she seems at home among the turbines, the water coolers and the thin layer of coal grime that covers the plant.

Mrs Thompson, 47, typically spends Thursday to Sunday in North London - where she lives with her husband and two children - meeting investors, customers, regulators and government officials.

The rest of the week is spent in York, from where she drives a few miles south to the Drax site near Selby. Here she spends part of her time dealing with trading, the rest overseeing the plant.

As for the little matter of coal and power production, Mrs Thompson surrounds herself with “people who bring out the commercial implications”. She is the financial and strategic brains behind the operation.

In a recent interview, Mrs Thompson compared Drax with the NHS: “It's almost infinite what you can spend on it, so it's about finding the right balance and places, and that is all down to the quality of communication,” she said.

Trained as an economist and with a background in project finance, Mrs Thompson is one of life's doers and, according to her colleagues, past and present, is destined for greater things.

The power station business is a far cry from where Mrs Thompson cut her teeth. The youngest of six children, Mrs Thompson, née Carrington, was schooled at an all-girls convent in Dorset. She excelled at maths and went on to study econometrics and mathematical economics at the London School of Economics.

A career in the City would have been the obvious choice. However, Mrs Thompson quit her first job at American Express for a fellowship at the National Development Bank of Botswana. After this, she joined the Commonwealth Development Corporation. the government-owned fund that pioneered venture capital investment in Britain's former colonies, a decision that led to her first involvment with the power industry.

In 1993 Mrs Thompson joined Powergen. Later she moved to Intergen, the power generation subsidiary of Shell and Bechtel, where she was responsible for the management and operation of four gas-fired power plants.

Her pastimes include hiking, skiing, sailing and scuba-diving.