Sunset for the U.K.’s coal-fired power, lessons for India

India could learn from the U.K.’s transition, ensuring that it does not make the mistakes Britain made

The shuttering of Britain’s last coal-fired power plant, in Nottinghamshire, is a milestone and indicates the hastening of an ongoing paradigm shift in energy production globally. But this has by no means been a frictionless transition, as it has been portrayed in much of the press. There have also been calls to replicate the United Kingdom’s coal phase-out globally. While Britain’s experiment could hold good for a few developed economies, a far more tailor-made approach would be required for developing and least-developed nations.

Britain’s coal phaseout must also not be viewed as beginning with its 2015 Paris pledge to bring down unabated coal-fired power to zero by 2025. It must largely begin with the disastrous Great Smog of London of 1952, leading to the enactment of environmental legislation such as the 1956 Clean Air Act and other protracted processes over a 70-year period, which included geo-political, environmental, economic and social pressures. The discovery of natural gas in the North Sea in 1965 and the desire to move away from coal imports from the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, as depleting domestic reserves made mining uneconomical, thereby jacking up costs of coal-fired energy production, collectively hastened the transition away from coal, which began almost 60 years ago. The subsequent forced closures of about 20 mines in the mid-1980s by the Margaret Thatcher government, despite a year-long miners’ protest, led to blight and inter-generational poverty that some parts of the erstwhile coal-reliant regions of the U.K. continue to face. This is not to undermine the urgency with which nations must work toward drastically reducing their carbon emissions over the next two decades, but to appreciate and emphasise the vastly different trajectories and plans required to reach this goal.

Let us consider comparing India with the U.K.’s trajectory to achieving net zero emissions. At the 2021 Glasgow COP, India and China stood out seeking an amendment to the final declaration and having the phrase ‘phasing down’ and not ‘phasing out’ of coal introduced. India pledged to achieve net zero emissions by 2070 and meet half its energy needs from renewables by 2050.

Cumulative emissions

India is the third largest carbon emitter, behind the United States and China, emitting about 2.9 gigatons in 2023, far ahead of the U.K.’s 384 million metric tonnes in the same year. But India’s population is over 20 times that of the U.K. Moreover, India’s per capita emissions were at 2 tonnes in 2023, less than half the global average of 4.6 tonnes and almost a third of the U.K.’s 5.5 tonnes in the same year.

An analysis by Carbon Brief that considered historical emissions of nations between 1850 and 2024 (till the closure of the Nottinghamshire plant), took into account their carbon footprint as colonial powers. This put the U.K. at fourth place, with emissions touching 10.4 billion tonnes, which Carbon Brief said was ‘more than most countries ever produced from all sources’.

Britain built the earliest known public coal-fired power plant in 1882 in the heart of London near Fleet Street. Coal became the mainstay in Britain, powering homes, industries and businesses for well over half a century until the mid 1960s. Coal employment peaked in 1920, employing 1.2 million miners at about 3,000 mines nationwide. About a 100 small coal-fired power plants dotted the landscape at this time, supplying power to nearby towns and industrial areas. And, Britain dominated coal exports in the early 20th century accounting for 30% of global exports in 1913. The U.K.’s peak thermal power consumption was in the 1950s and 1960s, when 90% of energy was generated by coal, before steadily shifting to natural gas, nuclear and, more recently, wind and solar.

India’s coal story

India’s first coal mine, the Raniganj coalfield, straddles present-day West Bengal and Jharkhand. While it was established as early as in 1774 by the British East India Company (and this is why historical CO2 emissions matter), this led to large-scale coal extraction from much of India’s eastern and central States of Jharkhand, West Bengal, Odisha, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh. India’s first coal-fired power plant was the Hussain Sagar Thermal Power Station, established in 1920 in Hyderabad, during the Nizam’s rule. It powered the twin cities of Hyderabad and Secunderabad well into the early 1980s. But it was not until 1956, when the Trombay power station near Mumbai was commissioned, that thermal power was truly heralded as India’s mainstay. Moreover, the average age of India’s coal-fired power plants is about 12 years, meaning they have a few decades before they could be decommissioned. While India has exported coal to neighbouring Myanmar and Sri Lanka, it has largely used its reserves for domestic power production. Of late, it has even been importing coal as power demand has been steadily rising.

India is yet to reach its peak coal production and consumption, which is expected between the years 2030-35, about 80 years since Britain reached this spot. About 70% of its energy output is currently from coal, accounting for 218 GW of installed capacity. It has more than 350 operational mines and about 120 new ones have been planned. A study by Global Energy Monitor estimates that these mines provide direct employment to almost 3,40,000 miners. This is likely an under-estimation as many from the agriculture sector are seasonal workers at mines. A Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW) study estimates that India’s thermal power plants employ about 4,00,000, people, again a likely under-estimation as informal employment at thermal power plants is high. This means that at its peak, about 10 years from now, the coal sector is likely to provide employment to well over a million people, which is about how many miners alone worked in Britain more than a century ago.

Moreover, Britain’s per capita energy consumption was almost three times India’s in 2022, and this is despite the Russia-Ukraine war-induced energy austerity, and even as the world was at the tail end of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Having made the case that a direct comparison on coal phase-out between the two countries cannot be made, there are lessons that India could learn from the U.K.’s transition particularly in the past decade, and also ensure it does not make the mistakes Britain made in the 1980s and 1990s.

Britain’s transition

After committing to phasing out coal by 2025, when Britain had already reduced its use to a fifth of its energy needs, it pursued a holistic transition of not just the workforce of the sector but also the regions and communities that depended on it. Retraining programmes focused on sectors that required skills similar to those in coal mining and power generation such as engineering, heavy machinery operation and maintenance. This was mixed with early retirement and redundancy payments; new education and apprenticeship programmes, and community and regional redevelopment of historically coal-dependent regions, or impetus to set up new industries in their place. The sighting of renewable energy projects, particularly offshore wind farms close to major coal producing regions such as the North Sea off Yorkshire, and repurposing the existing grid infrastructure to transmit wind energy along with remodelling old coal-fired power plants for other forms of energy generation such as biomass in Drax, have helped alleviate some of the fears of job loss and economic slowdown. This is not to say concerns do not remain, but the gradual decline in coal, with growing awareness about climate change, and transparent, fixed timelines to transition, enabled Britain’s coal phase-out. Outliers remain, like the protests at the now shuttered Talbot steel plant as the Tata-owned facility attempts to shift from coking coal to electric furnaces, but this might likely be a temporary closure.

While India has set itself a sufficient timeline of 45 more years to attain net zero emissions, there has already been a steady and impressive growth in renewables capacity. But coal-fired energy use also has risen, and the country must begin working on fixing timelines on plant decommissioning, regional redevelopment programmes, and retraining of miners and power plant workforces, bearing in mind that India’s historically coal-dependent regions are some of the poorest in the country, and have workers who have largely transitioned from agriculture to mining. Only a holistic, transparent, and early forward planning approach, would hasten a transition that is inclusive and just.

kunal.shankar@thehindu.co.in

Published - October 09, 2024 12:16 am IST