Should we celebrate the end of Ratcliffe-on-Soar, Britain’s last coal-fired power station, whose boilers went cold on Monday, bringing to an end 142 years of coal-fired electricity in Britain? Even as recently as 2012, 39 per cent of our electricity came from coal.
The news of the power station’s demise was, predictably enough, received with great enthusiasm by the climate lobby, who asserted that renewables had displaced this filthy form of generation. According to Lord Deben, the former Chair of the Climate Change Committee, the end of coal power in Britain will inspire the rest of the world to follow suit.
Coal is undoubtably a dirty fuel, producing around twice as much carbon dioxide as gas when used to generate an equivalent amount of electricity. But before the history of coal in Britain is finally laid to rest, let’s look at the case against its hurried demise.
Before the history of coal in Britain is finally laid to rest, let’s look at the case against its hurried demise
Firstly, if the rest of the world is going to be inspired by the decommissioning of Britain’s coal-fired plants there is little sign of it yet. China last year generated over 60 per cent of its electricity from coal. Many of these emissions end up being embedded in consumer products used in Britain. China is not the most coal-intense economy, either. South Africa generates around 80 per cent of its power in this way, India 75 per cent and Indonesia 60 per cent. These are big users.
Britain may have managed to displace coal with a combination of gas and wind power, with a small contribution from solar (4.9 per cent last year), but it is not a practical course for many countries which do not have easy access to gas supplies, and who would have no other practical means of coping with the intermittency of wind and solar. The advantage of coal is that it is very easy to transport, store and stockpile. Gas is much more difficult in this respect. We have learned how to transport gas by ship in liquified form – thankfully, because the energy crisis which followed the Ukraine invasion would have been a lot worse without it – but this is expensive and requires dedicated terminals. To store gas requires large volumes of tank space, or underground caverns such as the Rough gas storage facility, which was closed in 2017 because of its high maintenance costs – and then reopened in a hurry in 2022. Coal, by contrast, can be stored pretty well anywhere.
Had the Ukraine crisis happened a decade earlier, when we still had a significant number of coal-fired power stations, we could have done as Mrs Thatcher did before the miners’ strike in 1984, and stockpiled coal. Gas supplies for central heating would still have suffered a jolt in price, yet electricity prices could have been kept a lot lower. This is a point which has not been made nearly enough.
Nor is it true that renewables have exactly replaced coal. There is a growing gap between supply and demand for electricity in Britain which resulted in us importing a tenth of our power last year via sub-sea cables. These are facilities which were built in the hope that they would be used in both directions: Britain would export as well as import electricity, making the most of different patterns in supply and demand. Yet the cables are increasingly becoming a one-way street for Britain to import electricity to make up for the failure of the country to generate enough supply. This is certainly not helping us to achieve energy security (as Miliband keeps telling us his wind turbines will do) especially not now that Norway is looking at banning the export of power when its hydro-electric stations are failing to deliver the goods, such as in times of drought.
Few are mourning the demise of coal in Britain this week, but the truth is that we haven’t yet really found the means by which fully to replace it.