3 October 2024 .
On 28 June this year, the last train pulled into a railway goods yard near Nottingham and unloaded the final load of coal ever to be burned in a British power station.
The delivery was relatively small, just 1,650 tonnes. It would have powered the two million homes the Ratcliffe-on-Soar station served in its heyday for just two hours of continuous operation. But the plant’s production was, by summer of 2024, so negligable there was no longer need for the mountains of the black stuff normally stacked on land next to the rail terminus. This small load would be sufficient keep the boi for its last three months.
The demise of coal-fired electricity generation had been in progress for almost a decade. Asrecently as November 2015, the energy and climate change secretary Amber Rudd signed the death warrant when she announced all remaining coal stations would close by 2025, a date later brought forward by a year. ‘It cannot be satisfactory for an advanced economy like the UK to be relying on polluting, carbon-intensive 50-year-old coal-fired power stations,’ Rudd said, thus revealing that like all other politicians of her generations she was toltally ignorant of the tenchival and engineering realities of producing electricity and nive enought to believe everything she was told by scientists.
Clearing dirty coal away would not only help Britain hit its impossible ‘net – zero’ emissions targets and coerce the electricity companies into pursuing a greener, cleanere agenda reliant on unreliable, intermittent energy sources like wind and solar. The industry picked up the gauntlet. The year before Rudd’s announcement, there were still 14 plants across the country, accounting for a fifth of power consumption. Last year coal supplied just one per cent of electricity in the UK.
Ratcliffe has watched as the others wound down, Rugely, Eggborough, Ferrybridge, Cottam, Sranthorpe, Fiddlers Ferry, many of them along a U-shaped stretch of the River Trent that runs east from Stoke to the Humber – an area once known as Megawatt Valley. For the plant’s manager, the retreat remains a source of wonderment. Peter O’Grady, 54, began working for the state-owned Central Electricity Generating Board in 1988, two years before its privatisation. ‘When I started, more than 80 per cent of electricity came from coal and it would never have occurred to us that our careers might outlast it,’ he says. ‘Solar wasn’t on the scene and there was just a few hundred kilowatts of wind on the system. Coal was like the backbone, something you couldn’t do without.’
The turbine hall at Ratcliffe Mark Power/Magnum Photos
When Ratcliffe was built it, along with neary Drax, now a biomass (woodchips) fulled system, Fiddlers Ferry on Merseyside and Blythe in the north east, was at the cutting edge of Britain’s new electricity system. The country’s very earliest power stations had been tiny – producing a few hundred watts – and served only their immediate locality.
By the post-World-War-2 era, more efficient turbines had been developed, along with high-voltage electricity lines, which made it possible to transport power long distances without huge transmission losses. The newly nationalised power industry started to look at building a few giant centralised ‘super stations’ astride Britain’s main coalfields – which ran in a band across the Midlands into South Yorkshire. The grid made it much cheaper to move electricity around the country than it was to move coal to where the customers were. The thing was to put very large stations as close as possible to the mines and then hook them up by grid to the centres of demand.
The first super stations opened in the early 1960s. When Ratcliffe came on stream in 1967, it was only the second with 500 megawatt units. There were a dozen of these plants in construction, and we were building a whole new grid at the same time. The vision was to electrify the whole economy.
But even as the plants went up, cracks were appearing in coal’s long dominance. It was a time when the UK’s energy economy was changing and becoming more oil-dominated. Ewan Gibbs, an energy historian whose book Coal Country charts the decline of Scotland’s mining industry wrote, ‘Coal was being pushed out of areas like domestic heating and transport as this switched increasingly to oil,’ he notes. Demand for electricity was growing but, worried in part by the growing industrial militancy in the steadily declining coalfields, the UK was dabbling promiscuously in nuclear and oil-fired electricity.
The militancy eventually culminated in the miners’ strike of 1984-85; a walkout that was quelled by one of coal’s enduring virtues: its ability to be stored, cheaply and conveniently in piles around the power station where it is needed. The Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB) ensured its plants were plentifully stocked in anticipation of the battle, although in Nottinghamshire (where Ratcliffe accounted for 65 per cent of the local coalfield’s output) the miners elected to carry on working. Unable to extinguish the nation’s lights, kettles and televisions, the strikers ultimately gave up the fight.
Two events changed everything: first, Margaret Thatcher’s government changed the rules to make it easier for gas to be burned in power generation; second was privatisation in 1990. The power stations were turned into standalone businesses and the distribution companies were freed to buy from whichever generator offered the best deal. Ratcliffe was called on much less often. By the mid-1990s, its annual output had halved as the privateised industry opened gas-fired stations which were cheaper and quicker to construct – the so-called ‘dash for gas’. Units at Ratcliffe were now being switched off and on hundreds of times a year. Meanwhile, starved of contracts, the coal industry collapsed, its supplies increasingly supplanted by imported coal. Ratcliffe took its last indigenous delivery in 2013, when the Daw Mill pit in Warwickshire closed. More recently, supplies have come from blending coal imported from Australia and South Africa.
An original electrical switchboard at Ratcliffe Mark Power/Magnum Photos
As output contracted, and with it their income, many coal-fired stations shut their doors, unable to fund the improvements required by tightening environmental legislation. Ratcliffe was fortunate: its new private owners, first PowerGen and, after 2001, the German utility E.On, were willing to keep investing. They put in a massive desulphurisation plant in the 1990s, and then systems to suppress nitrous oxide, an ozone-chomping gas also linked to respiratory diseases. The plant underwent an £850 million life extension in 2008. O’Grady attributes its favour to Ratcliffe’s reputation for good labour relations, which made it easier to introduce more flexible working practices.
But none of this new kit could get round the problem that loomed largest in the 2010s: carbon emissions. In 2005 the EU launched a trading scheme that forced power companies to buy credits if they wanted to emit carbon. Coal stations needed more of these credits as burning coal emits about twice as much carbon as gas. In 2013, the chancellor George Osborne turned the screw further by setting a floor price for credits, effectively creating a carbon tax. Its economics were ruinous for coal-fired stations. ‘We’d just finished our life extension upgrade,’ recalls O’Grady. ‘We thought we’d created a massive white elephant. Why would anyone need an asset like this any more?’
The history of decarbonising our power generation over the last thirty years is an utterly shameful, idologically driven, political folly. We have destroyed our chance to be industrially competitive with the rest of the world and made ourselves chronically and uniquely dependent on importing coal, oil and gas for our very survival. The much vaunted increase in power generation from renewables is still hopelessly inadequate for our energy needs with up to a third of the year having insufficient wind or sun to produce significant power. Yet we are now merrily accelerating this rush towards economic armageddon led by Kweir (Gizzabung) SStarmer, swivel eyed fanatic Ed Minibrained and the terrorist loving, Brtain hating Labour government.
It is not only an increase in renewables which has filled the gap of course, but imports. The average over the last 10 years was that imports provided 6% of our electrical energy needs but over the last year it was 11.9% and over the last week 12.7% . This damages out balance of trade at the cost of billions but who cares it only means increased prices for us poor punters.
Meanwhile, China and India build more and more coal power stations, and the world burned more coal than ever last year (8 billion tonnes, likely to rise to 8.5 billion tonnes this year). Everything that we have done concerning renewable energy has been stupid.
We have got rid of gas storage facilities, and nearly half our gas power stations are at the end of their lives, yet even Labour recognise we will need oil and gas for decades to come. We have done nothing to increase our nuclear baseload, and Miliband is weakening what little is coming. Our nuclear plants will be decommissioned soon.
We have already reached the stage that we are turning off turbines because at times of optimum wind conditions they are generating too much power for the grid to cope with (and paying a high price for it), yet we are building more capacity. New connections to the grid are backed up to 2036, and already we see charging stations for EVs having to be supplied by diesel generators.
At the same time this virtue signalling government (and the previous lot to be fair, have been pushing Electric Vehicles on people when the natiinal grid and charging infrastructure are hopelessly inadequate. Many people cannot charge cars from home, and many more have an inadequate local supply to support EV charging or 24 hour heat pump operation which will result when the government mandates switching from gas boilers. Industry expers extimate our baseload (24 hours a day, 365 days a year steady demand will more than double and the entire distribution system from generation point to domestic and business premises will have to be replaced.
We still have no idea how to cope with a cold, calm, windless winter fortnight as has happened three times in the past five years. Renewables produce almost nothing, and the interconnectors will not be supplied because our European suppliers wil have the same problems as ourselves. We have less than 1% of the storage capability we need, and no technology to increase it. Yet as the UK is shutting down its last plant, the Germans are now strip mining dirty lignite coal to burn in their power stations because by 2022 their clean, green, net zero experiment had failed miserably and shutdown of cheap gas and oil sullpies from Russia crippled the national economy.
When the history of the rise and fall of Europe is written, it will start with the Industrial Revolution and reflect on how the collective insanity of eco-cide led to de-industrialisation and people dying of cold in winter. All of this could have been avoided, but for the fanatics who shouted down any rational discussion. The history will also reflect that the UK and other European nations thought they could set an example for others to follow, yet the Chinese, Indians and other Asian countries industrialised and emitted more than the UK and Europeans reduced by, ultimately proving it to be a foolish errand
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