The 2,000-megawatt Ratcliffe-on-Soar power plant in England will close Monday.
Credit...Rui Vieira/Associated Press

Britain Shuts Down Last Coal Plant, ‘Turning Its Back on Coal Forever’

The Ratcliffe-on-Soar plant was the last surviving coal-burning power station in a country that birthed the Industrial Revolution and fed it with coal.

by · NY Times

Britain, the nation that launched a global addiction to coal 150 years ago, is shutting down its last coal-burning power station on Monday.

That makes Britain first among the world’s major, industrialized economies to wean itself off coal — all the more symbolic because it was also the first to burn tremendous amounts of it to fuel the Industrial Revolution, inspiring the rest of the world to follow suit.

“The birthplace of coal power is turning its back on coal forever,” said Matt Webb, an associate director at the London-based research and advocacy group, E3G.

On Monday, in the middle of England, the end of Britain’s coal era will be marked by the closure of the 2,000-megawatt Ratcliffe-on-Soar facility. Uniper, the power company that operated the plant, said the 750-acre site would be converted to a “low-carbon energy hub.”

The closure comes 142 years after the world’s first coal-burning power plant began producing electricity at the Holborn Viaduct in London in 1882 and, in turn, accelerating Britain’s rise as a major industrial and imperial power.

Coal is the dirtiest fossil fuel. When burned, it produces greenhouse gases that have heated the Earth’s atmosphere and supersized heat waves and storms. While it was long the cheapest and most abundant source of power in many countries, including Britain, it has been replaced in recent decades by gas, nuclear power and most recently, renewables, like wind and solar.

That is especially true in wealthy countries, including in Britain. Oil and gas account for the majority of its power supply, though renewables are now 40 percent of the electricity generation and the government aims to generate all its electricity from non-fossil-fuel sources by 2030.

Likewise, in the United States, coal accounts for around 16 percent of electricity generation, down from more than half in 1990. Gas supplies more than 40 percent of U.S. electricity. France, by contrast, gets the largest share of its electricity from nuclear power plants, while Denmark sources 80 percent of its power from renewables, mainly wind.

The coal era, though, is still burning bright in China and India, the world’s two most populous countries, where energy demand is continuing to climb. Those two nations consume the vast majority of the world’s coal, and their hunger for coal sent global coal consumption to record levels in 2023, to 8.5 billion metric tons.

The International Energy Agency expects a turning point this year. China’s coal consumption could peak in 2024 and flatten out over the next couple of years, the agency projected, as the country ramps up wind and solar power.

The Ratcliffe plant, in the East Midlands region of Britain, had operated since 1967. It had been fed by coal from nearby mines, until those mines began to close in the 1980s, spurring a long, bruising coal miners’ strike and gutting entire towns and regions that relied on coal and coal power plants.

In sharp contrast to that history, the Ratcliffe closure plan was welcomed by a consortium of labor unions. It said that some of the plant’s 154 workers had found jobs elsewhere, including in Uniper’s other projects, and that the company had offered job training and an “enhanced” severance package.

“Delivering a fair climate transition for workers will be an uphill battle, but Ratcliffe can give us hope,” the Trades Union Congress said in a statement last week.

The pain point now is how to deal with steel plants that burn coal. Those furnaces are poised to be replaced by lower-emissions electric furnaces, endangering thousands of jobs.

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