The UK has stopped using coal. What’s happening in the rest of world?
The story of two coal declines
The country relied on coal for over 100 years, and until 1990, it accounted for the majority of electricity generated there. The UK relied on coal as a major source of electricity for more than 100 years. In the 1990s coal’s share of electricity dropped from 65% to 35%. There were also a number of mines closed across the UK. Coal was largely replaced by natural gas, which was becoming more widely available and beat out coal on economics, says Joel Jaeger, a senior research associate at the World Resources Institute.
Then, roughly a decade ago, came a second wave of coal retirements. This second wave of coal retirements was partly driven by policy. The European Union, to which the UK belonged at the time, had established a carbon price and the UK implemented a higher one in 2013 Jaeger claims that this made coal an even less attractive option. In the 2010s, renewables (mostly wind and bioenergy) were quickly ramped up to replace most of the remaining coal infrastructure.
Of the countries that have phased out coal the fastest, the UK has made the most impressive transformation, Jaeger says, since the country has totally wiped it from the grid. Portugal reached zero coal by late 2021 and Greece went from over 50% of electricity in 2014 to under 10% in 2023. Denmark has also quickly ramped down the fuel and, unlike other countries with quick transitions, replaced it almost entirely with renewables rather than natural gas.
A natural transition
The US is the largest nation among those that have moved away from coal the fastest, Jaeger says. The US has seen a more gradual transition than the UK, where coal’s contribution to electricity dropped from over 50% to 20% in just four decades. Jaeger believes that the fracking boom in the US in the mid 2000s helped make natural gas more affordable and more accessible in the US. He says that in recent years, the pollution standards of coal plants have been tightened, and the fleet is older, which has made them more expensive to operate and forced more to retire. The US is among the G7 nations that have committed to achieving zero coal power without interruption by 2035. The country is also shutting down its nuclear power plants. It will sunset the last plant in April 2023. Critics claim that this has slowed down the transition away from coal.
