The UK’s last coal plant will breathe its last gasp on Monday before closing for good and officially ending a century and a half of coal production in the country. The Nottinghamshire Ratcliffe-on-Soar plant was the last of its kind following Britain’s 2015 commitment to close all coal-fired power plants by 2025. Ratcliffe was scheduled to close in 2022 but remained open after Russia invaded Ukraine and Europe plunged into a gas crisis.
The Ratcliffe factory once had 3,000 engineers but now employs just 170 workers. That group will gather to watch a live broadcast of the facility being shut down, and more than 100 of them will work to decommission the facility over the next two years. Many other workers will move into new jobs at various power plants run by Uniper, the German owner of Raticliffe, while others will enter training programs to work in other areas of the industry.
Britain opened the world’s first coal-fired power plant in 1882, London’s Holborn Viaduct, with the help of Thomas Edison’s Edison Electric Light Company. Coal has played a major role in the UK until recently. According to a report from energy think tank Ember, coal accounted for 39 percent of the UK’s energy supply in 2012 but fell to just 2 percent in 2019. in the UK in 2023. Between 2012 and 2023, wind and solar generation also increased from six percent to 34 percent of the UK’s energy share. Britain still has a long way to go, but the move has made it the first G7 country to phase out all coal-fired power generation.
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