Extract from ABC News
Ratcliffe-on-Soar, Britain's last coal-fired power plant, formally stopped generating this week. (Reuters: Phil Noble)
As the clock struck midnight on Monday, UK time, the birthplace of the industrial revolution marked a quiet, albeit monumental moment in its history.
The giant machines that had spun inside the colossal Ratcliffe-on-Soar coal-fired power plant whirred away for the last time.
Steam rose from the eight enormous cooling towers no more.
Britain, which used coal to thrust its — and the world's — economy into the modern world when it opened the first ever coal-fired generator in 1882, was done with the fuel.
Britain gave the world the industrial revolution. And Britain's industrial revolution was fuelled by coal. (Getty Images: Hulton Archive)
Alison Reeve, the deputy program director of energy and climate change at the Grattan Institute, said the closure of Ratcliffe-on-Soar was a seminal moment.
"That's tremendously symbolic," Ms Reeve said.
"The only sort of equivalent I can think of would be if the US stopped using oil.
"I think there is a really high symbolic value on that, and it's a real signal."
That signal is the need – or lack thereof – for coal in a modern electricity system.
From a peak in 1950, when it accounted for a staggering 97 per cent of the electricity that was generated in the UK, coal is now no longer needed at all.
So how did it happen, and what does it spell for a country like Australia?
Coal in Britain: a long decline
For Ms Reeve, the answer to those questions lies in studying the ways in which Australia and Britain are similar and the ways in which they are not.
In terms of differences, she said the demise of coal in the UK had been in train much longer than it has in Australia.
For starters, the imperative to cut the use of coal started in the middle of the 20th century, when choking smog levels became a major health and political problem in cities.
Observers have also noted Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher further diminished the importance of coal when she shut mines to crush the power of mining unions in the 1980s.
Beyond that, Ms Reeve said the UK was simply facing up to the reality of geology – it was running short of coal, or at least the sort that could be mined at a competitive price.
"If they had kept that coal open, they would have run out of coal at some point," she said.
"They're not particularly well endowed, and they started burning it well before anyone else started burning coal.
"So they would have ended up relying on imports."
Indeed, since about 1970, and especially since the turn of the millennium, the UK imported coal to supplement its own declining supplies.
Another way in which Britain was different, noted Ms Reeve, was its interconnectedness with another grid – the pan-continental system which covered much of Europe.
Thanks to its high-voltage connections with the continent, she said the UK had a lifeline which Australia did not enjoy.
And for all the cheer in some quarters that Britain had gotten rid of coal, she said it had not done away with the type of round-the-clock, conventional power that coal exemplifies.
Nuclear still provides about 15 per cent of the UK's electricity needs, while gas supplies a much larger share of more than 30 per cent.
Cooking with gas, nuclear, wind
Similarly, much of the electricity it imports comes from France, which runs more than any other major economy on nuclear power.
Still, according to public repository Our World in Data, the share of the UK's power coming from wind, solar and hydro electricity is more than 30 per cent.
When another, more controversial type of renewable energy is added to the mix — biomass — the share from such sources rises to more than 40 per cent.
Gavin Mooney, the general manager at Kaluza, a technology firm backed by Australian energy giant AGL, said the huge changes to the UK's power mix had been driven by four things.
In a post on social media, Mr Mooney said Britain had paved the way for the removal of coal by building nuclear, gas and renewable plants while putting a stop to new coal-fired capacity.
Much of Britain's power now comes from offshore wind, which it has embraced with gusto. (Reuters: Phil Noble)
At the same time, he said the country had put a price on carbon emissions, killing the business case for coal power, which is the dirtiest form of generation.
Similarly, Mr Mooney said the British government had set "a clear timeline, giving industry time to plan ahead".
"The UK's coal plants have emitted more CO2 than most countries have ever produced, from all sources," Mr Mooney wrote on LinkedIn.
"But coal use in the UK started long before it was used for electricity generation."
According to Mr Mooney, the demise of coal in the UK came in two distinct phases.
The first involves the so-called dash-for-gas off the UK in the 1990s, when the discovery of huge gas deposits in the North Sea spurred a rush towards the fuel.
Coal's demise 'not by 'accident'
Gas, as a share of the UK's electricity mix, had exploded since.
Then, in 2008, he said the British Parliament passed a landmark piece of legislation that put a legally binding climate goal on the government.
Coal-fired generation in Britain has been plunging for decades and, with it, the associated employment. (Reuters: Phil Noble)
"As recently as 2012, coal generated nearly 40 per cent of the UK's electricity," he posted.
"But now, essentially all uses of coal have now been phased out and the last UK blast furnaces are set to close too."
Amid the commentary on the closure of Ratcliffe-on-Soar this week, critics pointed out power prices in the UK had shot up markedly in recent years to be among the highest in the world.
Others highlighted what they said was the loss of British manufacturing capacity to countries such as China, where electricity prices became relatively much cheaper.
Ms Reeve said it would be unfair and inaccurate to pin the blame for Britain's rising electricity prices on the rise of renewable energy or the decline of coal.
She said there were many unavoidable reasons for the trend.
Apart from the collapse of the domestic coal industry and the need for expensive imports, she said Britain was also feeling the effects of a heavy reliance on another fossil fuel — gas.
Coal use in the UK plunged after the discovery of huge reserves sparked a "dash for gas" in the 80s. (Reuters: Cathal McNaughton)
She noted that gas was increasingly setting the price of electricity in the UK and that price had been painfully high in recent years amid Russia's war with Ukraine and persistent demand.
In any case, Ms Reeve said British consumers were grappling with an unfortunate reality facing many developed economies, including Australia's.
Grid renewal doesn't come cheap
The country's electricity system was relatively old, she said, and many ageing plants would be in need of replacement even if there wasn't an energy transition underway.
"Even if climate change disappeared tomorrow, electricity prices would still probably go up," Ms Reeve said.
"The coal power stations that we have now would have to be replaced, and… if you have to do a major capital investment to replace an asset that tends to push up costs.
"So a lot of those price rises are coming because people are in capital replacement cycles, not because it's renewables, or it's because it's this or that, or whatever."
Alison Reeve from the Grattan Institute says Australia doesn't need nuclear to replace coal power. (Supplied: Alison Reeve)
Ms Reeve said it was perhaps inevitable that contrasts would be drawn between Australia and Britain on the subject of nuclear power.
Advocates for the industry say Britain's significant fleet of nuclear power plants had enabled it to wean itself of coal.
They argue that an absence of nuclear power in Australia made the job of closing down coal so much harder and would expose the country to unacceptable levels of intermittent renewable energy.
To these advocates, Britain's example strongly suggested Australia should follow suit and build nuclear plants to act as a replacement for coal, providing uninterrupted power in huge volumes.
However, Ms Reeve said it would be a mistake to think Australia could simply follow the UK's lead.
She noted that Britain had built its nuclear fleet decades ago, meaning their costs were sunk and they were producing power at relatively cheap prices.
Ms Reeve said Australia would be in no such position.
By contrast, she said Australia would have to start from scratch with nuclear power and all the signs from other advanced western economies building new nuclear plants suggested it could not be done without eye-watering costs.
Hinkley Point a 'cautionary tale'
The rebirth of nuclear power in Britain has not gone to plan, with huge cost and time blowouts. (Reuters: Peter Nicholls)
And she said nowhere was this more apparent than in the UK, where the country's first new nuclear plant in decades has become a monument to time and cost blowouts.
In 2007, the Hinkley Point C power plant was supposed to be built just 10 years later.
But by the time French firm EDF provided an original budget of £18 billion ($34 billion) in 2015, the plant was not due to be finished until 2025.
Earlier this year, following a spate of cost and time blowouts, EDF said the estimated costs of building the plant would soar to as much as £46 billion ($88 billion).
Completion of the first reactor was not expected until 2029 at the earliest.
"There's a lot of difference between old nuclear and deciding to build new nuclear," she said.
Ultimately, Ms Reeve said the significance of developments out of the UK went beyond simple arguments about whether Australia should have a nuclear energy industry or not, or how much it would cost.
She said the closure of Ratcliffe-on-Soar showed a modern economy did not need coal to keep the lights on.
That coal was gone in Britain, she said, has also been seen as a boon for a country like Australia, which she said had far superior renewable energy resources.
To that end, Ms Reeve said people could have confidence that Australia could manage life in a world where coal is gone.
"You don't need coal in a modern electricity system," she said.
"You can do without it."
The closure of Ratcliffe brought to an end more than 150 years' of coal-fired power production in the UK. (Reuters: Molly Darlington)
No comments:
Post a Comment