U.K., home of the industrial revolution, shuts its last coal-fired power plant

[mahatmakanejeeves]

U.K., home of the industrial revolution, shuts its last coal-fired power plant

Britain was a country powered by coal. Now it’s the first G-7 nation to quit it. In a matter of hours, the boilers at the Ratcliffe plant will cool to the touch.


A freight train passes the cooling towers at the Ratcliffe-on-Soar Power Station in Nottinghamshire, England on Sept. 17. (Gabriella Demczuk for The Washington Post)

8 min
By William Booth
September 29, 2024 at 7:30 a.m. EDT

RATCLIFFE-ON-SOAR, England — If you are looking for a signal event, a real ping, to mark humanity’s journey to slow global climate change, this is a thing.

On Monday, the very last coal-powered electricity plant in Britain is closing.
The coal age is over in the country that sparked the industrial revolution 200 years ago.

In a matter of hours, the boilers at the Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station — each the height of a 12-story building — will cool to the touch. The fireballs of pulverized coal that created the steam will go dark. The four 500-megawatt turbines will cease their once ceaseless spinning.

And the remnants of a once towering mountain of coal that powered the plant for 57 years will be a layer of dust ready to be swept away.

{snip}


Robert Marshall and the other plant workers are shepherding the end of Britain's coal era. (Gabriella Demczuk for The Washington Post)

By William Booth
William Booth is The Washington Post’s London bureau chief. He was previously bureau chief in Jerusalem, Mexico City, Los Angeles and Miami.follow on X @boothwilliam

[eppur_se_muova]

1. Save the turbines, save the cooling towers, save the grid interface, save the connecting lines.

Just replace coal furnace with a nuclear reactor. Makes licensing etc. much faster.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

2. The station was commissioned in 1968, so maybe all that is

ready for replacement anyway.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratcliffe-on-Soar_Power_Station

And good morning.

[hunter]

3. The hybrid gas / wind power system the U.K. enthusiastically embraced...

... to replace coal will do nothing in the long run to reduce the total amount of greenhouse gasses they dump into the atmosphere.

Last year about 32% of their electricity came from gas, 29% from wind.

https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/GB

If the U.K. wants to quit fossil fuels entirely they'll need to build more nuclear power plants. Nuclear power is the only energy resource capable of displacing fossil fuels entirely.

Wind power is dependent on fossil fuels, especially natural gas, for it's economic viability.