The UK is done with coal. How’s the rest of the world doing?
The UK is shutting down its final coal-fired power plant today, marking the end of an era for the country’s energy system. Once the backbone of the grid, coal has been steadily replaced with other, less polluting energy sources.
Coal is the most emissions-intensive fuel powering the grid today, and moving away from it, even to other fossil fuels, can help reduce climate pollution. Some countries have started to replace the fuel in earnest—members of the G7, a group of wealthy economies, have all agreed to phase out coal-fired power plants that don’t use carbon capture by 2035. But coal is still booming in other parts of the world, especially in some larger countries where electricity demand is growing quickly.
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.
Where coal is still king
Even as many nations, especially in Europe and North America, move away from coal, the fuel is still booming in other parts of the world. Energy demand globally is increasing, and coal has consistently been the world’s biggest power source, meeting about 35% of demand.
Nowhere shows this trend better than China. While most of the countries mentioned so far (the UK, Germany, the US, Greece, Denmark) have had either steady or decreasing electricity demand since 2005, China’s grid has expanded dramatically.
Total Chinese electricity demand was roughly 400 terawatt-hours in 1985. In 2005, it reached 2,500 TWh. As of 2023, it’s 9,500 TWh. The country is basically sprinting to build more power plants to keep up with demand, and much of it is being filled with coal-fired power plants.
Roughly two-thirds of new coal power plants that came online around the world this year were in China. However, the country is also seeing very quick rises in renewables, including wind and solar power. So even while the use of coal has skyrocketed in the country, the proportion of coal on its grid has ticked down slightly over the past few years.
India is also seeing quick growth of electricity demand, and coal accounted for roughly 75% of that country’s grid as of 2023.
The good news is the coal boom could have been a lot worse, Jaeger says. As of 2015 (the year that major nations signed the Paris Agreement, setting a goal to limit warming to roughly 1.5 °C over preindustrial levels), nearly 1,500 gigawatts’ worth of coal capacity was in development around the world. As of 2023, about half of those planned plants had been canceled or suspended. Roughly 30% went into operation, while the rest are still in development.
Shutting down coal plants is a great way to quickly reduce emissions from the power grid. The problem is, for many of the countries where coal is still growing, moving away from it is going to be harder than it’s been in countries like the UK.
The fleet of coal-fired power plants in both China and India is relatively new, so it would be more of a financial loss to phase them out now. Both nations also have booming domestic coal industries, so shifting away could have economic impacts for people there.
While both countries have high and growing emissions today, they’re not the biggest historical contributors to climate change. Europe and the US together have emitted roughly 40% of all greenhouse gases in the atmosphere since 1850, meaning those countries have contributed the most to the climate crisis.
Richer nations that have been able to move away from coal, like the UK, Germany, and the US, may need to support other countries that need to do the same, whether that’s through financial assistance, technology sharing, or other strategies, Jaeger says.
If there’s one takeaway from the shutdown of the UK’s final coal plant, he adds, it’s that “rapid speeds of transition away from fossil fuels are possible.”
