On Monday, the United Kingdom saw the closure of its last operating coal-fired power station, Ratcliffe-on-Soar, which has been in operation since 1968. The closure of the plant, which had a capacity of 2,000 megawatts, brought an end to the story. of coal use in the country, which began with the opening of the first coal-fired power station in 1882. Meanwhile, coal played a central role in the UK’s electricity system, in some years providing more than 90 percent of its total electricity.
But a number of factors combined to put coal in long-term decline: the growth of natural gas-fired plants and renewables, pollution controls, the price of carbon and the government’s goal of achieving emissions. net zero greenhouse gases by 2050.
From rise to fall
It is difficult to overstate the importance of coal to the UK grid. By 1956 it provided more than 90 per cent of the UK’s electricity. The total amount of power generated continued to rise well after that, peaking at 212 terawatt hours of production in 1980. And new coal plants were being considered for construction. as recently as the late 2000s. According to the organization Carbon Brief’s excellent schedule of coal use in the United Kingdom, it was considered to continue the use of coal with carbon capture.
But several factors slowed fuel use ahead of any climate target set by the UK, some of which have parallels with the situation in the United States. The European Union, which at the time included the United Kingdom, instituted new rules to address acid rain, which raised the cost of coal plants. In addition, the exploitation of oil and gas fields in the North Sea provided access to an alternative fuel. Meanwhile, significant efficiency gains and the relocation of some heavy industry overseas significantly reduced demand in the UK.
Through their effect on coal use, these changes also reduced employment in coal mining. At times, the mining sector has been a significant force in UK politicsbut the decline of coal reduced the number of people employed in the sector, reducing its political influence.
All of them had reduced coal use even before governments began taking aggressive steps to limit climate change. But in 2005, the EU implemented a carbon trading system that put a cost on emissions. In 2008, the UK government adopted national emissions targets, which have since been maintained and strengthened by the Labor and Conservative governments until to Rishi Sunakwho was removed before he had altered the trajectory of the United Kingdom. What started as a promise to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 60 per cent by 2050 now requires the UK to reach net zero by then.
These have included a carbon price floor That ensures that fossil fuel-fired plants pay a cost for emissions that is significant enough to promote the transition to renewables, even if prices in the EU carbon trading scheme are too low for that. And that transition has been rapid: the total number of generations generated by renewable energy has almost tripled in the decade since 2013, with great help from the offshore wind growth.
How to clean up the energy sector
The trends were significant enough that, in 2015, the United Kingdom announced that it would aim to end coal by 2025, even though the first day without coal on the grid would not come until two years later. But two years after that milestone, the United Kingdom was seeing entire weeks in which there were no active coal plants.
To limit the worst impacts of climate change, it will be essential for other countries to follow the UK’s lead. So it is worth considering how a country that committed to coal relatively recently was able to manage such a rapid transition. There are some UK-specific factors that will not be possible to replicate everywhere. The first is that most of its coal infrastructure was quite old (Ratcliffe-on-Soar dates back to the 1960s) and therefore needed to be replaced in any case. Part of the reason for its aging coal fleet was the local availability of relatively cheap natural gas, something that might not be true elsewhere, which put economic pressure on coal generation.