The UK just became 100% coal-free — here’s how they did it

After 142 years, the birthplace of coal became 100% coal-free on 1 October, when the Ratcliffe-on-Soar coal power plant in Nottinghamshire, UK, closed at midnight on Monday. Julia Evans gives the details.

Wind replaced coal

While gas still makes up a significant portion of the UK’s energy mix, most of the energy lost from coal was replaced with wind.

EMBER reported that as coal generation fell, the share of gas grew only from 28% to 34%. Wind and solar generation increased from 6% to 34% of UK generation in the same period, which – along with declining electricity demand – filled the gap.

The biggest increase was wind, which grew 315% (62 terawatt hours) from 2012 to 2023. Wind and solar grew by 75TWh during that period, displacing 28 million tonnes of coal and avoiding an estimated ￡2.9-billion in costs based on 2023 coal prices.

“Now the UK gets a huge amount of its power from wind, increasing amounts from solar, some from nuclear, and obviously a big chunk from gas, and that’s the next challenge for the UK,” said Sean Rai-Roche, a policy adviser in the UK, working on E3G ’s (an independent climate change think tank) Coal to Clean programme.?

“Gas is extremely volatile. It’s fluctuating all the time, there is a recognition that we need to phase this out next – but, obviously, it’s a huge milestone getting coal out of the mix, and more people are really starting to think about gas.”

Emissions

Since the UK began its rapid downscale of coal in 2012, it shut down 15 coal power plants, which made power sector emissions plummet by 74% – from 160 MtCO2e (metric tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent) to 41 MtCO2e in 2023.?

EMBER reported that this rapid decline in coal power from 2012 to 2023 avoided 880 MtCO2e, equivalent to more than double the UK’s total annual greenhouse gas emissions in 2023.

In 2023, emissions from electricity supply accounted for only 11.5% of all UK greenhouse gas emissions.

How they did it

Rai-Roche spoke to Daily Maverick and explained that they boiled it down to four lessons:

1. The UK set a stable, clear policy that had bipartisan political support?

In 2008, the UK introduced the Climate Change Act, which was the first legally binding commitment to reduce emissions by any country in the world. ?

All major political parties endorsed the act. Rai-Roche said: “That basically gave business and industry the confidence to know that this policy objective was stable.”

Rai-Roche explained that while the Labour government introduced the Climate Change Act, it was the economics of renewables vs coal that ensured there was partisan support, “because it didn’t make economic sense anymore to keep building coal”.

2. They set regulations that support that policy objectives

For example, in 2009, UK energy secretary Ed Miliband announced that “the era of new unabated coal has come to an end”, and the UK government ruled that there would be no new coal without carbon capture.

“It turns out that carbon capture technology was just too expensive, so that effectively ruled out building new coal plants,” Rai-Roche said.

3. They made polluters pay

The EU Emissions Trading System , introduced in 2008, made burning coal more expensive, which shifted the energy mix towards gas and renewables. This added to the overall phase-out of coal in the UK.

4. They supported the roll-out of renewables and expansion of the grid

The UK incentivised renewable energy investments and upgrades to their electricity through the 2013 Energy Act . This was followed by electricity market reforms , which significantly upgraded infrastructure to accommodate more renewables. These moves, along with setting a carbon price, made coal economically unviable.

A lesson for South Africa

South Africa,? the most coal-reliant economy among the G20 , with the sixth-largest coal fleet in the world for operational capacity, could learn from the UK’s experience.

President Cyril Ramaphosa recently signed South Africa’s Climate Change Bill into law , and while it is not fully operational yet, it introduces a carbon budget system, where companies that exceed their carbon budget will be expected to pay a higher rate of carbon tax on those “excess” greenhouse gas emissions.

Read full article on Daily Maverick.

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