Momentous milestone

While European countries and North America may be moving away from coal, it is still in much demand in other parts of the world.

Nearly a century and a half ago, in 1882, Great Britain fired up the world’s first coal-fired power station in London, sparking the Industrial Revolution and the kingdom’s ascendance as an industrial and imperial power. It also launched what would turn out to be a global addiction to coal, which continues today.

On Monday (30 September, midnight in the UK), it will shut down its final coal-fired power plant, the 2,000-MW Ratcliffe-on-Soar in Nottinghamshire, putting an end to a 142-year era of burning coal to generate electricity.

This makes the UK the first major economy, and the first among G7 members — the world’s most industrialized nations — to achieve this momentous milestone.

“The birthplace of coal power is turning its back on coal forever,” remarked Matt Webb, associate director at E3G, the London-based research and advocacy group.

An exceptionally laudable move by the UK for coal — long the cheapest and most abundant power source for many countries — is the most dirty of fossil fuels, producing, as it burns, greenhouse gases that heat up the planet’s atmosphere and cause mega-size heat waves and storms.

The UK relied on coal for over a century, and until 1990 coal was the major power fuel in the country. Then, in 1990, a series of coal mine closures across England saw coal being replaced by natural gas.

The country moved away further from coal after the European Union (which the UK was then a part of) set a price on carbon. An even higher price was set by the UK in 2013 which made coal even less cheap to use.

Also, at around that time, the UK started to ramp up on renewables, mostly wind and bioenergy, replacing most of its coal infrastructure.

Among countries that are speedily phasing out coal, the UK has been the most impressive. Other countries in Europe on the transition track include Portugal, Greece, and Denmark which, unlike other countries making a quick transformation, have replaced coal entirely with renewables instead of natural gas.

A recent MIT tech review points to the US as the largest nation among those moving away from coal the fastest, with coal dropping from contributing over 50 percent of electricity to 20 percent in the country.

This was possible due to the growing availability of natural gas made more accessible domestically and less expensive over the last few decades because of the fracking boom that started in the mid-2000s.

Renewables like wind and solar are coming more into the grid in the US, and tax credits have helped in making these cheaper, pushing older coal plants to close. The US has targeted to reach zero unabated coal power by 2035.

Another European industrial power is Germany which has also halved its use of coal in the past decade, replacing it with renewables rather than natural gas.

While European countries and North America may be moving away from coal, it is still in much demand in other parts of the world.

Nowhere is this better shown than in China, with the country rapidly building more power plants to keep up with demand — about 9,500 terawatt hours (TWhs) in 2023 — much of which is being met with coal power plants.

In 2024, roughly two-thirds of all new coal power plants in the world are found in China, according to the MIT. There is also growth in power demand in India, with coal accounting for some 75 percent of its grid as of 2023.

Still World Resources Institute research associate Joel Jaeger points out that the coal boom could’ve been worse.

For instance, in 2015, the year that major nations signed the Paris Agreement setting a goal to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees centigrade over pre-industrial levels, nearly 1,500 GWs (gigawatts) of coal capacity was in development globally.

By 2023, about half of those planned coal plants were canceled or suspended, roughly 30 percent were operationalized, with the rest still in development.

Closing coal power plants is one of the best possible ways to quickly cut emissions from the power grid. But for many countries, like the Philippines, where the use of coal still grows, moving away from it is going to be harder than it’s been in countries like the UK.

Coal power plants in China and India are relatively new so it would be more of a financial loss to phase those out now. Those countries also have booming domestic coal industries so moving away quickly could negatively impact their economies.

Richer nations that have made the shift like the UK, the US and Germany may need to support other countries — again, like the Philippines — to cut away from coal either through financial assistance, technology sharing or some realistic strategies.

But as of now, if there’s any takeaway that stands out from UK’s putting an end to its use of coal, it’s this: the transition away from that most dirty of air pollutants is possible and the sooner countries do so, the better the chances for the future survival of this planet and its inhabitants.