Last coal power station in UK prepares to close

The last coal-fired power station in the UK, the 2GW Ratcliffe-on-Soar facility in the East Midlands, is set to close next Monday, nearly 143 years after the world’s first coal-fired power station began operating in nearby London.

Marking the end of an era, not only for the United Kingdom but for the global coal industry, the closure of Ratcliffe-on-Soar on September 30 brings to a close the use of coal for power generation in the country where it all began.

The world’s first public coal-fired power station, the Edison Electric Light Station, was built in London and began operating in January of 1882. It was a fitting location, continuing the evolution of the industrial revolution which began in Great Britain a century earlier.

UK coal production started out slowly in the 1700s but quickly began increasing during the latter half of the 1800s, before peaking in 1913 at 292 million tonnes.

By 2019, however, annual coal production in the UK had fallen to only 2 million tonnes – 150-times lower than its 1913 peak – and by 2023 it had fallen to only 406 thousand tonnes. In 2023, coal comprised only 2.4 per cent of UK energy demand.

According to British energy think tank Ember, electricity from coal fell in the 1990s before remaining “relatively stable until 2012 when coal power made up 39% of electricity generation in the UK.

“This quickly dropped to around 7% just five years later in 2017, remaining at 2% of power since 2020, and now falls to zero with the closure of Ratcliffe.”

Coal’s rapid exit from the UK’s energy mix was driven by a combination of policy and financial incentives introduced since the early 2000s, with renewable energy stepping in to fill the gap. During this transition, coal-free days became increasingly common, as demonstrated in the graph below from Ember.

Having begun operations in 1967, German energy company Uniper committed to closing all four 500MW units at Ratcliffe-on-Soar by the end of September 2024, in line with government policy.

Uniper subsequently secured permission for a redevelopment of the Ratcliffe power station site in mid-2023, “for a range of modern industrial uses, including advanced manufacturing, low-carbon energy production, battery production, energy storage, logistics, and research and development.”

The last load of coal was delivered to Ratcliffe-on-Soar in early July, a milestone that heralded the end of 57 years of operations – over which time Uniper claimed the power station generated enough electricity to produce over 1 billion cups of tea per day, and over 21 trillion all told.

“The era of coal-free power begins,” said Frankie Mayo, senior energy & climate analyst, UK, at Ember.

“The UK has achieved something massive, shifting its power system from a huge polluter to one where renewables are thriving, in an astonishingly short period of time.

“But the work to build a clean power system will continue – to cut the need for expensive imported gas, to lower energy bills and to generate the clean electricity which will enable the rest of the economy to transition too.”