The last operating power plant in the UK coalRatcliffe-on-Soar, will close on Tuesday 1st October. – This historic moment is a huge victory for British society, but especially for climate activists and local residents – said Daniel Therkelsen from the Coal Action Network, an organization working to phase out coal.
The closure of the power plant in Nottinghamshire is not only the end of the unit that has been operating since the late 1960s, but also the end of nearly 150 years of coal-fired energy in Great Britain. – This is the last chapter of the extremely rapid transformation of the country that initiated the industrial revolution. Coal energy was once synonymous with industrial development. Now clean energy is driving economies – not only in high-income countries, but all over the world – emphasized Phil MacDonald from the analytical organization Ember.
Great Britain is stopping generating electricity from coal, but coal mining is not yet a closed chapter. Several mines are still in operation and coal is exported. However, in 2023, production dropped below one million tons (for comparison, last year 48 million tons of hard coal were mined in Poland). In September, a British court he didn't agree for the opening new one mine.
Energy transformation on the Islands
Great Britain is the birthplace of the industrial revolution, which led to the massive use of fossil fuels – coal, and later oil and gas. At that time, the consequences were not realized – polluting the environment and causing dangerous climate change by releasing gigantic amounts of carbon dioxide (although the first theories on this subject appeared already at the end of the 19th century).
The use of coal for energy production grew rapidly in the mid-20th century, reaching a peak in the 1980s. It has been declining since then, and the transition away from coal has accelerated very rapidly over the last 15 years or so. In 2012, an act on supporting low-emission energy production was adopted, and in 2015, a plan to phase out coal by 2025 was adopted. The share of coal in electricity production fell from almost 40 percent in 2012 to 2 percent in 2019.
Portal carbonbrief.org calculates that between 1882, when the first coal-fired power plant was launched, and 2024, 4.6 billion tonnes of coal were burned in the UK to produce electricity. This resulted in the emission of 10.4 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The portal points out that British coal is responsible for more CO2 than the total emissions of most countries in the world from all sources. For comparison total emissions carbon dioxide from 1750 to 2022 is almost 9 billion tons for Argentina, 5.5 billion for Pakistan, 7 billion for Egypt. During this time, Poland emitted 28.5 billion tons of CO2, and Great Britain – from all sources, not only coal – as much as 78 billion.
End of fossil fuels in 2030?
Coal has been replaced by renewable sources, nuclear and gas power plants – although the time of the latter is also numbered.
Over the last 12 years, the share of wind, hydro and solar power generation in the UK has increased from 6 to 38 per cent (the vast majority of which is wind). In the last 12 months approximately 15 percent came from nuclear power plants and 7 percent from biomass burning plants.
It is responsible for less than 27 percent of electricity production gas. The recently ruling party Work before the elections, she promised that she would set the goal of completely abandoning fossil fuels in the energy sector by 2030. Over the next six years, gas should gradually disappear from the so-called energy mix.
– Over-reliance on gas to produce electricity and heat homes has hit Brits hard during the ongoing crisis prices gas. Therefore, they see switching to renewable energy sources as an opportunity not only to reduce emissions, but also to stabilize energy prices, said Jess Ralston from the British expert organization The Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit.
A clean technology park instead of a power plant
Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station manager Peter O'Grady told the BBC that “small celebrations” were planned for Tuesday, October 1.
– This is an important event – the end of energy production from coal in Great Britain. When I started in the industry, 80 percent of electricity production came from coal. Next week this value will drop to zero. And we still have electricity in the sockets, O'Grady said.
As he says BBCa technology park related to “clean” technologies is to be built in place of the closed coal-fired power plant.