Why Britain’s last coal power station is closing its doors (2024)

On 28 June this year, a freight train snaked into some railway sidings near Nottingham and unloaded the final scheduled consignment of coal ever to be burned in a British power station.

By historic standards, the delivery was tiny: the 1,650 tonnes the train wagons spilled out would have powered the two million homes the Ratcliffe-on-Soar station habitually served in its heyday for just two hours of continuous operation. But so diminished was the plant’s production that there was no longer need for mountains of the black stuff. This amuse-bouche was thought sufficient to see it out for its last three months.

A few photographs were taken of managers in high-vis overalls and hard hats standing by the train. In honour of the occasion, the rail operator GB Railfreight had renamed the locomotive Ratcliffe Power Station. There were handshakes and a few statements for the media. Then the train rattled off. There would be no more drops at Ratcliffe or at any other coal-fired power station. After 142 years, a journey that began with Thomas Edison’s small plant on London’s Holborn Viaduct had reached the end of the line.

The demise of coal-fired power had been almost a decade in the making. Back in November 2015, the energy and climate change secretary Amber Rudd signed the death warrant when she announced all coal stations would close by 2025, a date later brought forward by a year. ‘It cannot be satisfactory for an advanced economy like the UK to be relying on polluting, carbon-intensive 50-year-old coal-fired power stations,’ Rudd said. Clearing dirty coal away would not only help Britain hit its emissions targets, it would goad the electricity companies into pursuing a greener, clean agenda. The industry picked up the gauntlet. The year before Rudd’s announcement, there were still 14 plants across the country, accounting for a fifth of power consumption. Last year coal supplied just one per cent of electricity in the UK.

Ratcliffe has watched as the others blinked off, many of them along a U-shaped stretch of the River Trent that runs east from Stoke to the Humber – an area once known as Megawatt Valley. For the plant’s manager, the retreat remains a source of wonderment. Peter O’Grady, 54, began working for the state-owned Central Electricity Generating Board in 1988, two years before its privatisation. ‘When I started, more than 80 per cent of electricity came from coal and it would never have occurred to us that our careers might outlast it,’ he says. ‘Solar wasn’t on the scene and there was just a few hundred kilowatts of wind on the system. Coal was like the backbone, something you couldn’t do without.’

On the day I visit, Ratcliffe is quiet; the plant isn’t generating. Out on site, we climb into what looks like a miners’ cage and ascend 170 feet to the top of the main building, which houses the equipment that drives the plant. From here we can survey the sprawling facility. Even now, with its coal stocks denuded and its machinery stilled, Ratcliffe has an air of monumental permanence. Everything about it is massive. The main complex containing the furnaces, generators and turbines soars above the pancake-flat countryside. Its eight cooling towers, each 375 feet tall, can be seen from the M1, some five miles away.

Heading inside, I am led to one of the mighty boilers where, peering through the door, I gaze upon a dusty space roughly the size of a church nave. One wall is studded with 48 circular bosses, which in operation spew a fine-milled coal dust (‘about the consistency of talc’) into the space, igniting it with propane and creating a self-sustaining fireball that blazes at more than 1,000°C. The intensity would melt the soaring walls but for the tubes that inlay them through which course water, carrying away the heat to produce the steam that powers the four massive turbine and generator sets far below. Each unit is capable of generating 500 megawatts of electricity; enough to power half a million homes.

When Ratcliffe was built, it was at the cutting edge of Britain’s new electricity system. The country’s very earliest power stations had been tiny – producing a few hundred watts – and served only their immediate locality. Their electricity was costly. Edison’s Holborn Viaduct station closed just six years after its 1882 opening, unable to attract enough customers to make a profit. It was the beginning of a long chase for better economics, which came from increasing scale.

By the post-war era, more efficient turbines had been developed, along with high-voltage electricity lines, which made it possible to transport power long distances without undue transmission losses. The newly nationalised power industry started to look at building a few giant centralised ‘super stations’ astride Britain’s main coalfields – which ran in a band across the Midlands into South Yorkshire. ‘The grid made it much cheaper to move electricity around the country than it was to move coal to where the customers were,’ says Peter Atherton, an independent energy consultant. ‘The thing was to put very large stations as close as possible to the mines and then hook them up by grid to the centres of demand.’

The first super stations opened in the early 1960s. When Ratcliffe came on stream in 1967, it was only the second with 500 megawatt units. ‘The scale of it all was breathtaking,’ says O’Grady. ‘There were a dozen of these plants in construction, and we were building a whole new grid at the same time. The vision was to electrify the whole economy.’

But even as the plants went up, cracks were appearing in coal’s long dominance. ‘It was a time when the UK’s energy economy was changing and becoming more oil-dominated,’ says Ewan Gibbs, an energy historian whose book Coal Country charts the decline of Scotland’s mining industry. ‘Coal was being pushed out of areas like domestic heating and transport as this switched increasingly to oil,’ he notes. Electricity was the citadel, but even here, worried in part by the growing industrial militancy in the steadily declining coalfields, the UK was dabbling promiscuously in nuclear and oil-fired electricity.

The militancy eventually culminated in the miners’ strike of 1984-85; a walkout that was quelled by one of coal’s enduring virtues: its ability to be stored, cheaply and conveniently in piles around the power station where it is needed. The Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB) ensured its plants were plentifully stocked in anticipation of the battle, although in Nottinghamshire (where Ratcliffe accounted for 65 per cent of the local coalfield’s output) the miners elected to carry on working. Unable to extinguish the nation’s lights, kettles and televisions, the strikers ultimately gave up the fight.

A chart of Ratcliffe’s output shows how it changed over the years. From its commissioning until the 1990s, the plant ran pretty much constantly; shutdowns only happened when a unit required maintenance. Then came two events that changed everything: first, Margaret Thatcher’s government changed the rules to make it easier for gas to be burned in power generation; second was privatisation in 1990. Ratcliffe was called on much less often. By the mid-1990s, its annual output had halved as the new private industry opened gas-fired stations which were cheaper and quicker to construct – the so-called ‘dash for gas’. Units at Ratcliffe were now being switched off and on hundreds of times a year. Meanwhile, starved of contracts, the coal industry collapsed, its supplies increasingly supplanted by imported coal. Ratcliffe took its last indigenous delivery in 2013, when the Daw Mill pit in Warwickshire closed. More recently, supplies have come from blending coal imported from Australia and South Africa.

As output contracted, and with it their income, many coal-fired stations shut their doors, unable to fund the improvements required by tightening environmental legislation. Ratcliffe was fortunate: its new private owners, first PowerGen and, after 2001, the German utility E.On, were willing to keep investing. They put in a massive desulphurisation plant in the 1990s, and then systems to suppress nitrous oxide, an ozone-chomping gas also linked to respiratory diseases. The plant underwent an £850 million life extension in 2008. O’Grady attributes its favour to Ratcliffe’s reputation for good labour relations, which made it easier to introduce more flexible working practices.

But none of this new kit could get round the problem that loomed largest in the 2010s: carbon emissions. In 2005 the EU launched a trading scheme that forced power companies to buy credits if they wanted to emit carbon. Coal stations needed more of these credits as burning coal emits about twice as much carbon as gas. In 2013, the chancellor George Osborne turned the screw further by setting a floor price for credits, effectively creating a carbon tax. Its economics were ruinous for coal-fired stations. ‘We’d just finished our life extension upgrade,’ recalls O’Grady. ‘We thought we’d created a massive white elephant. Why would anyone need an asset like this any more?’

In the nine years since Amber Rudd’s deferred closure notice, change has been swift. In April 2017 came a landmark: for the first time in 135 years, the UK experienced a 24-hour period where no coal was used to generate electricity. To prevent precipitate closure of the remaining coal capacity, which might have threatened the security of supply, the government offered subsidies to keep a few coal stations open, including Ratcliffe, paid to sit on standby. Their presence helped at moments of crisis, such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which left gas both scarce and expensive. Ratcliffe got very good at ramping up and down its system. ‘It used to take 12 hours to do a “start” from cold,’ says Nigel Bates, 59, the plant’s engineering manager. ‘By the end we’d got it down to four, and if the boilers were still hot we could do it in 84 minutes.’

Coal’s place on the grid has been usurped not by gas, but largely by the remarkable expansion of renewable energy. In 2010, wind and solar power accounted for 2.7 per cent of UK electricity and coal for 28 per cent. By 2023 that picture had reversed, with wind and solar at over 30 per cent and coal just 1 per cent. It’s a change that has been driven by steep falls in the cost of solar panels and wind turbines. The other big contributor has been lower electricity demand, which has fallen since 2010 by an astonishing 18 per cent to 316 terawatt hours last year, according to Our World in Data.

Proponents of renewables argue that the switch to green power not only reduces emissions, which last year fell to their lowest level since 1879. It also reduces the need for fuel imports and could even cut the cost of electricity by minimising fuel costs. But some think that substituting intermittent generation for reliable coal and gas could make the power system more fragile, especially if the new Labour government expands wind and solar dramatically to hit its target of decarbonising the UK’s electricity system by 2030. There won’t be any assistance from falling demand. As consumers switch to electric cars and heating, demand for electricity is expected to shoot up.

It’s not a problem that unduly troubles Peter O’Grady. While he’s proud of the part Ratcliffe played in keeping Britain’s lights on for nearly 60 years, and impressed by the speed of the energy transition, his concerns are now mainly around cleaning up after its demise. Following Ratcliffe’s closure at the end of September, the plant enters a six-year decommissioning process as the buildings are levelled and the land released for redevelopment. By a quirk of fate, Ratcliffe ends its life back in state hands – albeit this time German ones. E.On demerged its coal and gas plants in 2016 into a new company, Uniper, as it focused on building renewables. Some of Ratcliffe’s 175 staff are leaving for jobs in other Uniper stations. Around 120 are staying for decommissioning. O’Grady will be among them, although he admits the prospect of pulling the plant down doesn’t gladden his heart. But his colleague Nigel Bates, who spent the last decade coaxing life from its ageing machinery, is more demob happy. He doesn’t plan to long outlast the final coal train. ‘After 43 years, I think I have done my bit.’

Why Britain’s last coal power station is closing its doors (2024)

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