UK’s Last Coal-Fired Power Plant to Close at Midnight

The UK’s last operational coal-fired powered station will cease operations at midnight today, calling time on 142-years of coal-powered electricity in the UK.

After 57-years, Ratcliffe-on-Soar in Nottinghamshire will stop generating electricity tomorrow and will mean that the UK will be the first major economy to have stopped using coal. This comes as coal power is still estimated to account for 17% of the OECD’s country’s electricity generation.

Its closure follows the country’s decision (made in 2021) to cease coal power generation from 2025 and marks a major departure from previous decades where coal was the UK’s primary source of energy. For example, during the 1980s coal made up as much as 80% of the country’s electricity generation (and still 40% twelve years ago).

As noted on the BBC’s Today programme, its estimated that 4.6bn tonnes of coal have been burnt since Thomas Edison established the first coal-fired power station, Holborn Viaduct in 1882.

The second of Port Talbot’s bast furnaces will go offline today, ending primary steelmaking in Wales and putting thousands of jobs into redundancy. The steelworks were reported to lose as much as £1m a day according to its owners Tata, with the international conglomerate closing the first of the furnaces in July.

With Port Talbot being the UK’s largest steelworks and having been in operations for over a century, today’s closure has been the topic of considerable political debate, with the government pledging £500m worth of investment into electric arc furnace technology, hoping to restore jobs over the coming years.

Alongside government investment, Tata have also said that they will invest £750bn into the technology. Tata have however signalled that such technology would not be operational until 2028.

The works will continue to produce hot and cold strip mills to roll steel slab, though this steel will be imported from abroad.

This morning, figures from the ONS indicated that UK GDP grew 0.5% on a quarterly basis over the second quarter of the year, coming in marginally softer than forecasts and marking a slight slowdown from Q1’s print of 0.7%. The second reading also came in 10bps lower than the preliminary estimate published last month.

According to the ONS, the UK’s services sector grew by 0.6% over the quarter, though this was “partially offset” by declines across the production and construction sectors.

With this representing the second consecutive quarter of relatively robust growth, UK economic output now appears to have turned a corner from the relatively stagnant growth seen over H2 2023. The latest data also indicates that the UK economy is now 2.9% larger than its pre-pandemic size.

This comes against an international backdrop which has seen the US economy grow 9.4% compared to pre-pandemic levels, while France and Germany have expanded 3.7% and 0.2%, respectively.