Britain’s transition to a low-carbon future has reached a milestone with the closure of its final remaining coal-fired energy plant at Ratcliffe-on-Soar in Nottinghamshire.
The shutdown of the 57-year-old energy plant on Monday ends greater than 140 years of coal energy technology within the UK – an industrial story intently interwoven with Britain’s socioeconomic and political historical past.
Between the purpose when Britain’s first coal energy plant started producing in 1882 till Ratcliffe’s closure, the UK’s coal vegetation burned by 4.6bn tonnes of coal and emitted 10.4bn tonnes of carbon dioxide, in response to analysts at Carbon Transient, greater than most international locations have ever produced from all fossil gas sources.
The tip of an period has been welcomed by commerce unions, inexperienced campaigners and politicians as an exemplar for the way polluting industries might be wound down whereas safeguarding its labour drive and communities. It additionally offers an opportunity to look again and replicate on the central function coal has performed in powering trendy Britain:
The coal revolution
Britain’s reliance on coal dates again to the Roman empire. The British Geological Survey believes the Romans might have begun mining within the Nettlebridge space of Somerset, England, near the Fosse Method, to supply coal used as gas to warmth baths and forging iron. But it surely was the Industrial Revolution when coal got here into its personal as an important driver of Britain’s rising industrial may.
Demand for coal exploded within the 1700s because of a inhabitants growth. Initially, the nascent British mining trade struggled to maintain up with demand, however the invention of the steam engine in 1712 unlocked the potential of Britain’s plentiful reserves within the coalfields of central Scotland, south Wales, the Midlands and north-east England.
Coal-driven Newcomen engines pumped out the water that commonly flooded the mines, affording entry to deeper and extra plentiful reserves. Within the early 1700s, about 3m tonnes of coal have been mined yearly – a quantity which exploded to greater than 30m tonnes by the 1830s.
Within the early 1800s, coal was used to make city gasoline for lighting and to gas the enlargement of Britain’s burgeoning railways. But it surely was solely in 1882 that Britain opened the world’s first public coal-fired energy station at London’s Holborn Viaduct. The plant, constructed by Thomas Edison’s Edison Electrical Gentle Firm, initially generated sufficient electrical energy for nearly 1,000 avenue lights from Holborn Circus to St. Martin’s Le Grand in addition to personal residences. Different small-scale coal energy vegetation adopted.
The fossil-fuel century
At first of the twentieth century nearly 100% of Britain’s electrical energy was generated by coal vegetation. By 1950, its dominance remained largely unchallenged at 96%, and within the late Sixties and Nineteen Seventies Britain’s state-owned Central Electrical energy Producing Board ushered in a brand new technology of tremendous coal vegetation.
In 1966, Ferrybridge C started producing electrical energy on the River Aire in West Yorkshire. It opened with a producing capability of two,000 megawatts from 4 500MW models, the primary in Europe to create electrical energy from a producing unit of this measurement.
Inside two years, coal vegetation of the same measurement mushroomed up throughout Britain’s coalfields: Ratcliffe-on-Soar, Cottam and West Burton A all started producing energy in Nottinghamshire; and the Eggborough energy plant began operations in North Yorkshire.
By the tip of the last decade, the Ironbridge and Rugeley coal energy vegetation started producing energy within the West Midlands. In complete, about 12 energy stations of this scale started producing electrical energy within the years between 1966 and 1974, culminating within the big Drax plant in North Yorkshire.
After a pointy droop in the course of the 1984-1985 miners’ strike coal energy didn’t return to the highs recorded initially of the last decade. By the Nineteen Nineties, Britain’s sprint for gasoline energy and rising environmental considerations spelled the start of a protracted existential decline for coal.
Powering previous coal
The millennium started with coal accounting for 36% of the UK’s electrical energy; with newer gasoline energy vegetation and nuclear reactors taking part in a bigger function within the energy system. Coal vegetation turned more and more costly to run resulting from laws that referred to as for pricey upgrades to assist cut back air pollution.
By 2008, the UK authorities handed the Local weather Change Act – mandating an 80% lower total in six greenhouse gases together with carbon dioxide emissions by 2050 – elevating questions over the way forward for coal technology, which produces double the carbon emissions as newer gasoline energy vegetation.
In 2013, a brand new tax designed to high up the price of carbon emissions tipped the scales additional in favour of gasoline. The tax was largely answerable for the shutdown of 10 of the UK’s largest coal energy vegetation over the subsequent decade.
In 2015, the federal government set out plans to finish all coal-fired energy technology completely by 2025. In the identical 12 months, world governments met in Paris for the UN local weather talks, resulting in the 2016 Paris Local weather Settlement to maintain the rise in world floor temperature to nicely under 2C.
By 2020, coal energy had dwindled to only 1.8% of the UK’s electrical energy combine, and in 2021 the federal government introduced ahead the ban to October 2024. The choice to hasten the tip of Britain’s coal energy period was introduced simply months earlier than the UK hosted the Cop26 UN local weather talks in Glasgow, the place calls to section out coal took centre stage.
The Ratcliffe plant had initially deliberate to close in late 2022 however its proprietor, the German power firm Uniper, later mentioned it might maintain the plant operating in the course of the Europe-wide gasoline disaster which was triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine below an settlement with the federal government.
Michael Shanks, the minister for power, mentioned the closure marked the tip of an period, including: “Coal employees might be rightly happy with their work powering our nation for 140 years. We owe generations a debt of gratitude as a rustic.”
