A tale of two coal declines
The power plant, scheduled to shut down at midnight on September 30, is called Ratcliffe-on-Soar, and it’s the last bastion of coal in the UK, where the fuel has a rich history. The country relied on coal for over 100 years, and until 1990, it made up the lion’s share of electricity generated there.
Since then, the UK has seen two major waves of cutting down coal. The first came in the 1990s, when coal went from around 65% of electricity supply to roughly 35%, and there was a series of mine closures across the country. Coal was largely replaced by natural gas, which was becoming more widely available and beat out coal on economics, says Joel Jaeger, a senior research associate at the World Resources Institute.
Then, roughly a decade ago, came a second wave of coal retirements. This time it was driven in part by policy: The European Union (which the UK belonged to at the time) had set a price on carbon, and the UK implemented an even higher one in 2013. That made coal even less economical an option, Jaeger says. In the 2010s, renewables (mostly wind and bioenergy) were quickly ramped up to replace most of the remaining coal infrastructure.
Of the countries that have phased out coal the fastest, the UK has made the most impressive transformation, Jaeger says, since the country has totally wiped it from the grid. Others with speedy transformations include Portugal, which reached zero coal in late 2021, and Greece, where coal went from supplying over half the electricity in 2014 to less than 10% as of 2023. Denmark has also quickly ramped down the fuel and, unlike other countries with quick transitions, replaced it almost entirely with renewables rather than natural gas.
A natural transition
The US is the largest nation among those that have moved away from coal the fastest, Jaeger says. It’s been more of a steady change than what happened in the UK—coal has dropped from contributing over 50% of electricity to 20% over the last four decades.
Much of the shift was a response to the growing availability of natural gas in the US—the fracking boom beginning in the mid-2000s made it more domestically accessible and less expensive, Jaeger says. In more recent years, pollution standards for coal plants have slowly tightened and the fleet has aged, he adds, making the plants more expensive to run and causing more of them to be retired.
More recently, the US has seen renewables like wind and solar coming onto the grid, and tax credits have helped make them cheaper, pushing more older coal plants to shut down. The US is one of the G7 countries that have agreed to reach zero unabated coal power by 2035.
Germany has also roughly halved its coal use in the past decade, and it’s replaced the fuel mostly with renewables rather than natural gas. The country has simultaneously been shutting down nuclear power plants, sunsetting the last one in the country in April 2023. Some critics argue that this has slowed the move away from coal.