Last coal plant goes dark

Britain’s last coal-fired power station, the Ratcliffe plant in Nottinghamshire, stopped generating on 5 June, and with it ended 144 years of a national story that began when the first coal plant switched on in London in 1882. The closure had been scheduled for years, the station’s staff had rehearsed the shutdown, and the operators had kept the lights on long enough to watch the transition arrive. The moment was quiet, which is how infrastructure milestones usually happen, and it deserves a harder look than the tributes are giving it.

The scale of the achievement needs to be stated precisely. In 2012, coal supplied about forty percent of Britain’s electricity; by the time the last plant closed, the share was a rounding error, and the replacement came from wind, nuclear and gas rather than from a reduction in demand. No economy of Britain’s size has made that transition on that schedule, and the engineering and the policy discipline behind it are real things, not slogans. The carbon that did not enter the atmosphere this decade is a physical fact, and it is worth remembering when the same people who deny progress elsewhere quote the price of the transition.

The arguments the closure settles are fewer than the ones it opens, and I want to open a couple of them. The first is about gas. Britain ended coal by leaning on gas, and gas is a fossil fuel with its own price, its own politics and its own emissions, which means the country has swapped one dependency for another and called it independence. The closure was billed as a victory for the grid’s future, and the grid’s future still runs substantially on molecules rather than electrons. The honest sentence is that Britain finished the easy chapter, the one that closed coal, and is now in the hard chapter, the one that must close gas, and the hard chapter has no scheduled date on it.

The second argument is about how the transition was paid for. The communities around the coal plants, the mining towns and the power-station villages, were promised that the future would find them, and the record of that promise is mixed in ways that the national newspapers did not cover on 5 June. Some of those places have become the sites of the new industries, with battery plants and green hydrogen projects on the old pitheads; others are still waiting, with unemployment that predates the closure and no obvious date when the future arrives. A transition that does not carry its own geography with it is not finished, whatever the grid statistics say.

The third, and the one I keep returning to, is the lesson the closure offers the rest of the world. Britain could afford to close coal because it had the alternatives, a mature gas network, a grid that could import electricity, and an economy that no longer smelted steel on the scale of the old industrial age. The countries now burning the most coal are precisely the ones without those cushions, and asking them to follow the British timetable without the British infrastructure is not a policy, it is a slogan. The Ratcliffe shutdown is a genuine achievement and a borrowed one at the same time: it was paid for by the very fossil system that the rest of the world is now being asked to skip. That is the uncomfortable arithmetic of the milestone, and the reason the next decade of the energy transition will be fought in places far from Nottinghamshire.