Vehicles drive past the Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station in Nottingham, England, on Sept. 29. The closing of Britain's last coal-fired power plant marks the end of coal-generated electricity in the nation that sparked the Industrial Revolution.Rui Vieira/The Associated Press
Few countries have been more associated with coal than Britain, where the black rock has been part of the economy and the culture for more than 200 years. On Monday that era came to an end.
Britain’s last coal-fired power station shut down for good at midnight, making Britain the first Group of Seven country to completely wean itself off coal to generate electricity.
The Ratcliffe-on-Soar station near Nottingham opened in 1967 as one of the country’s largest power plants. Its four coal-fired boilers could produce 2,000 megawatts of electricity, enough to power more than two million homes. The station’s eight giant cooling towers and its 200-metre-high chimney have dominated the local East Midlands skyline for decades and it once employed as many as 3,000 workers. When it shut down on Monday, it had 170 employees.
“It’s bittersweet,” said Harry Atkinson, a maintenance engineer. “You’ve got folks who have worked here 40 years and it’s sad. We’ve all shed a tear. But none of us are blind to the fact that climate change is an issue and we need to decarbonize.”
Mr. Atkinson, 25, started at the plant as an apprentice after graduating from high school and he’s among the handful of staff who will be kept on for another year to decommission the facility. He’s also deputy mayor of the nearby district of Erewash.
“For a lot of people this has been everything,” he said in an interview. “It’s provided homes, holidays, cars. It has been the life source for a lot of people. And I think that’s why it’s sad, because it is sad when something that’s given you everything is closing. But, you know, we look to the future.”
Added plant manager Peter O’Grady; “When I started my career 36 years ago, none of us imagined a future without coal generation in our lifetimes.”
Coal has been a critical part of British life since the 1700s when it helped drive the Industrial Revolution. In 1882 the Edison Electric Light Company opened the world’s first coal-fired power station in London, producing electricity for homes.
Up until the 1960s, nearly all of Britain’s energy production relied on coal sourced from hundreds of mines across the country. At its peak, Ratcliffe burned as much as 6.5 million tonnes of coal annually.
But as worries about pollution increased, and as oil and gas started flowing from the North Sea half a century ago, the country began turning to other sources of fuel.
Coal’s share of overall energy production fell to 1 per cent last year while wind power contributed nearly 30 per cent. That’s roughly double the contribution from nuclear power and not far behind natural gas at 32 per cent. (The remainder comes from other renewables and imports from Europe.)
Several countries have phased out coal for electric power – such as Sweden and Belgium – but Britain will be the first major industrialized country to do so. Canada has pledged to end its reliance on coal-fired electricity by 2030.
Environmental groups hailed the Ratcliffe shutdown as an important milestone in the fight against climate change. In 2022, coal-fired power plants accounted for around 40 per cent of global greenhouse-gas emissions.
The plant’s closing has been in the works for a couple of years and the last coal delivery to the station was in June.
“The good news is the U.K. shows that once a country clearly commits to a coal phase-out it often happens even faster than planned, because the policy landscape becomes clear and paves the way for cheaper alternatives,” said Christine Shearer, an analyst at Global Energy Monitor.
Carbon Brief, a Britain-based climate research organization, estimated that from 1882 up until Monday, Britain has burned through 4.6 billion tonnes of coal and emitted 10.4 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide. That’s more emissions than most countries have ever produced from all sources, the organization calculated.
The closing of Ratcliffe, along with plans announced this week to shut the last coal-fired blast furnace at the Tata Steel plant in Wales, “will help push overall coal demand in 2024 to its lowest level since the 1600s,” the organization said in a report.
The owners of Ratcliffe, Germany’s Uniper SE, said that they plan to turn the site into a “zero carbon technology and energy hub.” The company said that could include advanced manufacturing, battery production and energy storage.
Shutting Ratcliffe will also help Britain’s new Labour government meet its ambitious environmental objectives, which include creating a zero-carbon electricity system by 2030. To get there the government will have to substantially increase the amount of power generated by wind, solar and nuclear reactors and slash the reliance on natural gas.
The plans have already received pushback from unions who say the transformation could cost thousands of jobs. “We’re going to see huge reductions in our carbon emissions, but at what price?” asked Gary Smith, the head of the GMB union, one of the country’s largest labour organizations.