The rise and fall of coal

Posted: November 04, 2024

At midnight on October 1 of this year, the UK’s last coal-fired power plant stopped generating electricity for good.1 Ratcliffe-on-Soar, near Nottingham, started operating in 1967, when coal still made up the bulk of the country’s energy supply and formed the backbone of its industry. The plant’s closure was preordained: in 2015, the government pledged to end coal power generation over the next decade, and a final date was eventually penciled in four years ago.

By then, emissions limits and the growth of other fuels, including renewable energy, meant many of the country’s once-mighty coal stations had already closed. But Ratcliffe’s shutdown still marked the end of an era. Coal, in many ways, is the commodity that made Britain what it is today—driving industry, politics, trade and empire. So how did the UK, the birthplace of the coal-fueled Industrial Revolution, become the first country to give up the black stuff for good?

The history of coal in Britain 

Coal’s history runs deep in Britain. By the third century, the Romans were already scraping it from surface deposits to fuel fires at a temple dedicated to the goddess²  Much later, mining moved underground with the help of early steam engines, which were used to pump water out of flooding collieries and allowed miners to dig deeper and deeper to access the rich coalfields stretching from south Wales to north-east England and central Scotland. 

By the end of the 18th century, James Watt had perfected his coal-powered steam engine, ushering in the Industrial Revolution. From then on, coal meant progress: it powered the new mechanized factories, fueled the railways and steamships that expanded international trade, and changed arguably every aspect of daily life. As technology made coal use more efficient, it also spread to more and more applications, driving demand for it ever higher in spite of those efficiency gains—an effect that came to be known as the Jevons paradox. 

It took a few more years before the world’s first coal-fired power station would see the light of day. In January 1882, Thomas Edison opened the Edison Electric Light Station at the Holborn Viaduct in central London. Edison was eager to expand his business after developing his practical carbon filament light bulb. The viaduct provided a place to demonstrate a model power station that, Edison hoped, could eventually grow into a whole network of plants to light up New York City and prove the feasibility of his electric distribution system.³

A few years earlier, while demonstrating electric lights at his laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, he had expressed his unabashed hopes for the spread of electricity: “After the electric light goes into general use,” he proclaimed, “none but the extravagant will burn tallow candles.”⁴

How did Edison foreshadow the energy transition? 

When the time came to build a power station, Edison found London to be the perfect spot. As a keen believer in underground cables, he had already clashed with the gas companies who had a firm monopoly on digging up the streets. But the Victorian architects of the viaduct, he discovered, had helpfully included the perfect solution to his problems: underground culverts that could be repurposed to carry power cables from the station to nearby streets and homes. 

So, he installed a 27-tonne generator, driven by a coal-fueled steam engine, and lit up the surrounding area with a thousand incandescent lamps. Only a few months later he opened the Pearl Street central generating station in New York City. In a picture taken that year, an already grey-haired Edison stands squinting next to his hulking dynamo—one of six installed at the plant—one hand in pocket, the other thumb hooked into his waistband.⁵ (In a nod to its size, the machine was nicknamed Jumbo, after P.T. Barnum’s famous circus elephant.)⁶

Although Edison was skilled at building on others’ inventions—and infamous for trying to discredit his competitors—the two stations still arguably launched the modern electric utility industry. Although cutting-edge in its design, Pearl Street only powered a tiny part of Lower Manhattan. Nevertheless, it was a hit: the offices of The New York Times were among the first customers to benefit and the light was reported to be “soft, mellow [and] grateful to the eye.”⁷

In an uncannily prescient episode, Edison later foreshadowed much of the energy transition that would usher out the age of coal in industrialized nations. In a conversation with Henry Ford and tire maker Harvey Firestone, he tackled the specter of depleting natural resources: 

“We are like tenant farmers, chopping down the fence around our house for fuel, when we should be using nature’s inexhaustible sources of energy—sun, wind, and tide,” he reportedly said. “I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait till oil and coal run out before we tackle that. I wish I had more years left!”⁸

Coal’s heyday and decline 

When Edison died in 1931, coal’s heyday was still far from over. After dips caused by miners strikes in the 20s and during the Great Depression a few years later, coal use in the UK reached its peak of 221 million tonnes in 1956. Electricity was only part of it: Steelmaking and other industries, as well as the railways and the production of town gas and domestic heat, all consumed vast quantities of the fossil fuel.

During the second half of the century, the discovery of North Sea gas, the end of steam trains and general deindustrialization all contributed to its decline.⁹ But in Britain’s electricity sector, coal would continue to dominate well into the 1980s, sparking the construction of massive rural power plants including Drax—still the largest power station in the country, although now converted to burning biomass. 

See how Drax uses an industrial data platform to empower its data scientists and improve maintenance and asset uptime.

When it eventually came, coal power’s decline was almost as swift as its beginnings. In the 1990s, combined cycle natural gas turbines started displacing coal as a cheaper, cleaner alternative. Coal generation cratered in the space of a decade, falling from roughly three-quarters of total electricity generation to just around a third by the turn of the millennium. 

Then came the rise of renewables and regulations to curb carbon emissions, including the UK’s Climate Change Act of 2008, with a target to cut greenhouse gas emissions to 80% below 1990 levels by 2050—a goal later increased to net zero. Ed Miliband, the energy and climate secretary at the time, summed up the direction: “The era of new unabated coal has come to an end.” 

Since the coal phaseout was announced in 2015 one milestone has followed another: the country’s last deep coal mine closed that same year. It marked the first time without coal power since the opening of the Holborn Viaduct station in 2016. The first full coal-free day followed the year after that. The power plants closed one after another: Ironbridge, Eggborough, Fiddlers Ferry, Aberthaw. Most had run at a fraction of their capacity for a long time. Still, in the 142 years that passed between Edison’s first station and the shutdown of Ratcliffe-on-Soar, the UK burned through a staggering 4.6 billion tonnes of coal. 

As for that pioneering project in Holborn? The world’s first coal power plant only ended up operating for a few years, all of them at a loss. When it shut down, the lamps on the viaduct were switched back to gas. But the foundations had been laid; Edison was off, back to New York, and it wouldn’t be long before coal-fired electricity would take over the world.