U.K. Closes Last Coal Plant
For the first time in 142 years, Britain has no coal power plants. But what are they doing instead?
How will they replace that power? Their strategy leaves something to be desired.
This final coal closure comes at a time when price caps on electricity are expiring, and citizens are protesting as their power and gas costs are set to rise 10%. Price caps are a short-term band-aid that hides the impact of poor energy policy. As these caps expire, people feel the burden of energy policies that close reliable and affordable capacity while building more unreliable wind and solar.
The U.K. set a target for net-zero carbon emissions in the electricity sector by 2030— one of the most stringent targets in the world. The plan involves massive increases in wind and solar including doubling onshore wind, quadrupling offshore wind, and tripling solar power.
The country currently has two nuclear reactors under construction, Hinkley Point C1 and C2, which are targeted to come online in 2029 and 2030, respectively. The new reactors have already been delayed by several years, so they may not arrive in time to provide reliable power to help meet the ambitious target.
In 2023, the country’s power grid was already 23% wind and 4% solar, but those renewables are backed up by readily dispatchable natural gas capacity. A full phase-out of fossil-fueled electricity generation by the end of the decade would require that that capacity be replaced by something reliable, and the intention to multiply the country’s wind and solar capacity while only two new nuclear plants are under construction is not evidence that they’ll be ready to meet the challenge.
For context, Britain used to be referred to as the Saudi Arabia of coal. The industry was nationalized after World War II, which led to the coal miners’ union becoming politically powerful. Its strikes for higher pay in the early 1970s led to widespread power cuts and the fall of the Conservative government in 1974. That prompted Margaret Thatcher to take on the union in a major political confrontation in the early 1980s, and also, crucially, to embrace the potential of natural gas to ensure that the union’s power would wither on the vine. Britain’s energy mix diversified, prices fell, and carbon emissions dropped drastically as a result. This may have led subsequent governments to think that further diversification and emissions reductions would be easy. But, the shift to renewables has not come nearly as easily as the rise of natural gas.
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