A story of two coal declines
The facility plant, scheduled to close down at midnight on September 30, is known as Ratcliffe-on-Soar, and it is the final bastion of coal within the UK, the place the gasoline has a wealthy historical past. The nation relied on coal for over 100 years, and till 1990, it made up the lion’s share of electrical energy generated there.
Since then, the UK has seen two main waves of reducing down coal. The primary got here within the Nineteen Nineties, when coal went from round 65% of electrical energy provide to roughly 35%, and there was a collection of mine closures throughout the nation. Coal was largely changed by pure gasoline, which was turning into extra broadly out there and beat out coal on economics, says Joel Jaeger, a senior analysis affiliate on the World Sources Institute.
Then, roughly a decade in the past, got here a second wave of coal retirements. This time it was pushed partially by coverage: The European Union (which the UK belonged to on the time) had set a worth on carbon, and the UK applied a fair increased one in 2013. That made coal even much less economical an choice, Jaeger says. Within the 2010s, renewables (largely wind and bioenergy) have been rapidly ramped as much as substitute many of the remaining coal infrastructure.
Of the international locations which have phased out coal the quickest, the UK has made essentially the most spectacular transformation, Jaeger says, because the nation has completely wiped it from the grid. Others with speedy transformations embrace Portugal, which reached zero coal in late 2021, and Greece, the place coal went from supplying over half the electrical energy in 2014 to lower than 10% as of 2023. Denmark has additionally rapidly ramped down the gasoline and, not like different international locations with fast transitions, changed it virtually solely with renewables fairly than pure gasoline.
A pure transition
The US is the biggest nation amongst people who have moved away from coal the quickest, Jaeger says. It’s been extra of a gentle change than what occurred within the UK—coal has dropped from contributing over 50% of electrical energy to twenty% over the past 4 a long time.
A lot of the shift was a response to the rising availability of pure gasoline within the US—the fracking growth starting within the mid-2000s made it extra domestically accessible and cheaper, Jaeger says. In more moderen years, air pollution requirements for coal crops have slowly tightened and the fleet has aged, he provides, making the crops costlier to run and inflicting extra of them to be retired.
Extra just lately, the US has seen renewables like wind and photo voltaic coming onto the grid, and tax credit have helped make them cheaper, pushing extra older coal crops to close down. The US is without doubt one of the G7 international locations which have agreed to achieve zero unabated coal energy by 2035.
Germany has additionally roughly halved its coal use prior to now decade, and it’s changed the gasoline largely with renewables fairly than pure gasoline. The nation has concurrently been shutting down nuclear energy crops, sunsetting the final one within the nation in April 2023. Some critics argue that this has slowed the transfer away from coal.