The last coal power plant in the UK, Ratcliffe-on-Soar, is shutting down operations at the end of this month to start a new era of coal-free power with wind and solar powering the nation.
According to an analysis by think tank Ember, coal power was effectively replaced by wind and solar, which quadrupled their power generation since 2012 when coal’s rapid decline began. As coal generation fell from 39% of British power in 2012 to 1% in 2023, the share of wind and solar electricity increased from 6% to 34%.
This was driven by wind power, which alone grew 315% (+62 TWh) in the same period. Wind and solar’s growth of 75 TWh (terawatt hour) since 2012 displaced an estimated 28 million tonnes of coal.
Coal accounted for 39% of the UK’s total generation in 2012 and is set to become zero by October 2024. The world’s first coal-fired power station, the Edison Electric Light Station, was built in London in 1882. The UK National Grid was founded 53 years later in 1935, and ever since coal has played a core role in the national electricity supply.
Although the proportion of electricity from coal fell in the 1990s, it was then 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. This marks an absolute fall of 140 TWh from 2012 to 2024.
Coal’s displacement from the UK power sector happened extraordinarily rapidly. Since 2000, 25 coal plants have closed or switched to other fuels, 15 of those since 2012. The combination of policy and financial incentives since the early 2000s meant that the role of coal began to dwindle long before the closure of the Ratcliffe power plant.
The UK has seen an increasing number of coal-free power days after the first in 2017. This trend did not reverse in recent years, even as gas prices spiked in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Power sector emissions plummeted by three quarters (-74%) over that time, as coal’s share of power was largely replaced by wind and solar.
“The era of coal-free power begins,” said Ember analyst Frankie Mayo. “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.”
Ember’s report highlights that the UK’s shift away from coal was driven by five main factors -- ambitious decarbonisation targets, the introduction of a rising minimum carbon price which made the economics of coal less favourable, strong policy support for wind power, market reforms, and investments and innovations in the grid.