On 30 September 2024, the UK shuttered its last remaining coal-fired power plant [
1]. The closure marks a historic milestone, the end of 142 years of coal fueled prosperity. The country opened the world’s first plant to supply electric streetlamps in 1882, spark-ing a global energy revolution that has led to today’s nearly univer-sally electrified world.
Faced with the rising threat of global warming, an equally seis-mic transition is now underway as many countries seek to reduce their use of fossil fuels, especially coal, and embrace renewable sources of electricity [
2]. The UK’s economy is the largest so far to abandon coal power [
3], and experts say that its experience holds lessons that could help other countries in their efforts to phase out coal. “The UK demonstrated that, with the right policies, it is possible to transition away from coal power while maintaining the reliability of the electricity system,” said Jennifer Morris, a principal research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy in Cambridge, MA, USA.
There is general agreement that the shift from coal is vital to meet international targets to reduce climate-warming CO
2 emis-sions. In November 2024, delegates to the 29th United Nations “Conference of the Parties” Climate Change meeting in Baku, Azerbaijan, heard that global average temperatures were 1.54 °C above pre-industrial levels, making 2024 the hottest year on record [
4]. Meanwhile, the Paris, France-based Interna-tional Energy Agency (IEA) reports that 2024 was also a record year for global coal demand, which reached 8.77 billion tonnes, one-third of that burned in China’s coal-fired power stations (
Fig. 1) [
5].
It is generally accepted that quickly cutting coal—and eventu-ally gas—out of electricity grids is one of the most important steps to keep global warming well below 2 °C, the target set by the 2015 Paris Agreement [
6]. “The most significant thing about the UK’s example is how fast it happened—it proves to other countries that a rapid phasing out of coal is possible,” said Joel Jaeger, a senior research associate at the Washington, DC, USA-headquartered World Resources Institute, a large global non-profit focused on environmental issues.
In 1990, coal power supplied about 65% of the UK’s electricity, but that dropped to roughly 35% by 2000 when 25 coal plants were still operational [
7]. During this period, many older coal plants were replaced by gas-fired power stations, fueled by a glut of rel-atively cheap natural gas [
8].
Since then, a series of regulatory and policy changes finished off the rest of the country’s coal-power plants [
9]. In 2008, the govern-ment passed the Climate Change Act [
10], which imposed a legally binding commitment to reduce the country’s greenhouse gas emis-sions by 80%, relative to 1990 levels, by 2050. The following year, it said that because of this act, no new coal-power plants could be built unless they captured their CO
2 emissions for long-term geo-logical storage [
11]. That kind of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology would have added considerable expense, so the policy effectively eliminated new coal plants.
In 2013, the government set a minimum carbon price—a levy that electricity generators must pay for every tonne of CO
2 they emit—which gradually increased year after year, imposing a grow-ing financial penalty on coal plants that made their electricity increasingly expensive [
9]. This was followed by stricter air pollu-tion standards that would have required aging coal plants to make expensive upgrades, making them even less economical [
9]. Finally, the government committed to phasing out all coal power by 2025. “That was crucial in getting the remaining coal plants out of the system,” Morris said. That target was reached when the last operational plant at Ratcliffe-on-Soar, near Nottingham, closed in September 2024.
While coal was being squeezed out, renewable energy benefit-ted from sustained political and economic support. Thanks to a clear roadmap and generous subsidies [
9], the UK’s offshore wind power capacity more than quadrupled from 2012 to 2023, and, together with solar power and large-scale biomass fuelled power stations, renewables now supply almost half of the UK’s electrical power (
Fig. 2) [
12]. These changes have also coincided with a per-iod of falling electricity demand in the country, due to deindustri-alization and improvements in energy efficiency. Consequently, this transition has been achieved without increasing the use of gas for power generation, said Frankie Mayo, senior UK analyst at London, UK-based Ember, a global energy think tank working to accelerate the clean energy transition.
As a result, the country’s annual carbon emissions from power generation fell from 160 million tonnes of CO
2 in 2012 to 41 mil-lion tonnes in 2023 [
9]. The country’s next decarbonization goal is that natural gas should supply less than 5% of its electricity by 2030 [
13], although it will be used for domestic heating and cook-ing for much longer [
14].
Many countries are on a similar journey as the United Kingdom. Austria, Belgium, Portugal, and Sweden have already phased out coal power [
15], and the Group of Seven (G7) nations (including, besides the United Kingdom, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United States) have pledged that any remaining coal plants in their countries will use CCS by 2035 [
16]. Countries with relatively elderly plants should also be able to deploy many of the same political strategies that have worked in the United Kingdom, said Jaeger. “But what worked in the UK is not always going to work elsewhere,” he cautioned.
The world’s biggest coal power users, China and India, will have a much longer and more difficult journey to phasing out coal power [
17]. China hosts more than half of the world’s coal power capacity, while India has the second-largest share, accounting for about 15% of global capacity [
18]. Both countries have younger plants—the majority of China’s were built after 2005—so their owners want them to continue operating for many more years to recover a return on their investments, said Ryna Cui, an associate research professor and acting director of the Center for Global Sustainability at the University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA.
China and India are also building the majority of new coal-fired plants (
Fig. 3) [
18]. “Right now, 70% of all coal capacity that is planned and being developed is in China, and the next highest is in India,” said Jaeger.
Nevertheless, China is also building renewable power capacity faster than any other nation. In 2023, it installed 301 GW of wind, hydro, and solar power, making up 59% of the world’s new renewable capacity [
19]. “China has made really tremendous progress in adding wind and solar to their grid,” said Cui. “If China can set a successful example, that may be helpful for developing countries to follow.” China is also investigating whether some coal plants could be adapted to operate more flexibly, running only when needed to fill gaps in renewable supply, she added.
There has been much debate about whether China’s CO
2 emissions have already reached their peak [
20],[
21]. According to Cui, the rise of renewables has been so rapid that it is unclear whether the extra supplies of clean energy yet outstrip the country’s rising electricity demand. But even if emissions have not quite peaked in China, ‘‘it is coming soon,” said Jaeger. “The government has pledged to reduce coal power, starting in 2026 to 2030, and it is committed to carbon neutrality by 2060. China has a pretty clear plan.”
Meanwhile, however, India does not yet have a clear strategy to move away from coal but is targeting carbon neutrality by 2070, Jaeger said. “It does seem like India is about 10 years behind China,” he said.
Just 13 other countries account for almost all new coal power capacity (
Fig. 3), and many have already scaled back their plans. “The growth in coal that we are seeing is not nearly as much as we thought it was going to be back in 2015,” said Jaeger. “We are actually in a way better place.” Cui said this is partly due to difficulties in obtaining financing for new plants. “For example, China committed to stop financing new overseas coal plants, and that contributed a lot to the slowdown of new builds,” she said.
In the United States, coal power capacity has declined from 45% in 2010 to 16% in 2023 [
22]. Like the United Kingdom, the United States has instituted clean air standards that increase the cost of operating coal-power plants and has, as well, provided incentives for renewable energy. However, most of the shuttered coal capacity in the United States has been replaced by natural gas-fired stations, rather than renewables [
23].
Roughly one-quarter of the remaining coal plants in the United States are set to retire by the end of the decade, Morris said, but the remainder may operate for much longer. The US Environmental Protection Agency issued a rule in 2024 that requires plants to use CCS to reduce their emissions by 90% by 2032 (if they expected to operate past
2039), which would squeeze plant economics in the same way as in the United Kingdom [
24]. However, the incoming Trump administration is expected to overturn this rule [
25].
Morris said that more consistent policymaking, legally binding emissions reduction targets, and a carbon pricing system are needed to accelerate decarbonization in the United States. “Changes in those areas would have a dramatic impact on the speed of the US energy transition,” she said. But those changes are unlikely to happen soon, she added.
Regardless, as the cost of renewable energy continues to fall, brute economics may prove the most effective way to consign coal power to history. “Nearly all countries are hitting the point where coal is no longer the cheapest source of electricity,” Jaeger said.
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