It is Genuinely Historic

After 142 years, we finally stop burning coal in the UK

It’s not often that a story relevant to the Fully Charged Show makes it into the mainstream media, but you will see a lot of reports about this in the old fashioned press, on telly and radio and of course online.

I had a half baked plan (obviously solar powered half baking) of recording a report while standing in front of Ratcliffe-on-Soar Power Station in Nottinghamshire this morning. “Behind me isBritain’s last remaining coal burning power plant, and this massive edifice of the fossil age is closing today, for good.”

It would have been like proper journalism, but for reasons to dull to divulge, I’m typing this in my nice warm kitchen.

Ratcliffe-on-Soar just outside Nottingham, is the last remaining coal power station, built in the 1960’s, designed to burn coal from the Nottinghamshire coal mines that once surround it

It would use the heat from burning millions of tons of coal to boil billions of gallons of water to create steam to drive turbines to spin generators to create electricity.

The name of the location this monster construction dominates gives a clue to why this position was chosen. These technologies (coal, gas, nuclear) all need vast amounts of water to operate. Hence the river Soar which passes nearby.

So that’s it. The last coal power plant. No biggie really, we have closed many dozens of coal burning power plants over the last 25 years, I can remember filming an episode of Scrapheap Challenge at a recently decommissioned coal burner back in 2000. But the fact that this really is the last one and the results can be seen clearly in the graphic below makes this an important date.

This is from the energy think tank EMBER https://ember-climate.org

For those interested, their work is fascinating. I have interviewed Ember’s founder Bryony Worthington on the Fully Charged Show podcast, a truly impressive person.

Check the first 5 years of the Fully Charged Show’s existence, 2010 to 2015. We were still burning coals on a regular basis, not from local coal mines, mainly imported from Poland.

This was during the time when many hundreds of men posted comments on various episode of the Fully Charged Show to claim that electric cars were dirtier than diesel because the power came from burning coal.

An incorrect argument even back then, posted by people who may have been slightly ignorant of the efficiency of the electric vehicle system and the quantity of coal burning electricity that was consumed by our three big oil refineries. (One refinery, in Pembrokeshire, Wales, consumes more electricity in one year than a mid sized UK City.)

It’s an old argument, but to put it as simply as possible, an electric vehicle is between 80 and 90% efficient. The latest, ultra efficient lean burn combustion engines are between 20 and 25% efficient.

Which means in simple fiscal terms, every £1 $1 €1 you pay for fuel in a combustion car, only 20 to 25 cents or pence moves you along the road.

75 to 80 pence or cents is just thrown away, wasted, lost as heat.

In an electric vehicle, 80 to 90 pence or cents moves you along the road for every £1 $1 €1 you pay for electricity. You’re wasting 10 to 20 pence/cents in transferring the power from the charger and all the non motive power needs the vehicle uses.

There’s just no comparison in terms of energy efficiency so even if powered by the dirtiest coal burning plant, the amount of CO2, particulate emissions and overall economy, the electric vehicle wins by a massive, embarrassing margin.

So back to generating power by burning coal. We’ve been doing it since 1882 in the UK and it transformed the world we lived in. The British Isles are blessed, or maybe cursed, with ample supplies of coal.

In 1920, well over 1 million men worked in thousands of coal mines in Scotland, the North of England Kent and South Wales. It was a filthy, low paid and dangerous job. In 1920 life expectancy for coal miners was brutally short, around 36 years, while during the same period, an agricultural worker average life span was 62 years.

But that coal warmed our homes and workplaces, powered our transport network (steam trains) and provided cheap, reliable electricity to millions of people who would previously have burned gas, paraffin or even whale oil to light their homes.

And the power stations needed to produce all this electricity were enormous, here is an aerial shot of the Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station that is closing down today

It covers a vast area, you can see the main chimney from 60 miles away. And remember this one was ‘modern’ and ‘efficient’ compared to the original Victorian power stations.

Interestingly, once the site has been cleared, and yes, it will all be demolished in the coming years, apparently the future of the Ratcliffe site is now being reimagined.

Various developers have been working with the local Borough Council to redevelop the site as a hub for zero-carbon technology and energy generation.  So that’s very good news.

But, you may ask, what has replaced the generating capacity of this massive power station? Many people will cite gas and nuclear, and they are not totally wrong. We have increased the number of gas peaker plants in the last 20 years, we definitely burn more gas than we did 20 years back. However the the total nuclear generating capacity has fallen over the same period.

So what has taken over? Of course this is a leading question, according to all the reports, studies and government papers regarding the UK’s power supply, the rapid growth in solar and wind was responsible for 87% of the fall in the use of coal during the last 20 years. 

The UK is the first of the G7 countries to achieve the end of coal, and so we should. We are blessed with enormous areas of shallow sea off our coasts which lend themselves to offshore wind farms, we are cursed with a building industry that is mostly stuck in the 1970’s, dreadful dated companies still building new homes with no solar PV, batteries or geothermal heating.

Literally, right now, there is a plumber installing a wretched gas boiler in a new house somewhere in the UK.

But apart from that, and the billions the fossil fuel industry are spending to spread their message, this is a very positive bit of news.