As hot house gases concentrations continue to rise, the UK takes a positive step forward, according to the guardian:
The last coal power station in Britain will be forced to close in 2025, the government said as it laid out its plan to phase-out the polluting fossil fuel.
Ministers promised last year that the UK would close coal power within a decade and replace it with gas and other sources to meet its climate change commitments.
But in a delayed consultation on the phase-out, published on Wednesday, officials admitted that the last coal power station was likely to shutter in 2022 even without government intervention, prompting calls from campaigners to bring forward the cut-off year.
Greg Clark, the energy secretary, said the move sent a clear signal to the world that the UK was a good place to invest in clean energy. “Taking unabated coal power out of our energy mix and replacing it with cleaner technology, such as gas, will significantly reduce emissions from the UK’s energy use,” he said.
The remark concerning coal-fire power stations closing by 2022 was interesting, so I hunted that down in Coal Generation in Great Britain:
In the central scenario we project forward the current economic conditions affecting the level of coal generation. In this scenario, coal and gas prices follow BEIS’s 2016 interim central trajectory. In addition, the level of penetration of low carbon generation is consistent with the Government’s declared policy ambition and it has been assumed that given the challenging economic conditions for coal, only two plants make the investment needed to meet the requirements of the Industrial Emissions Directive and are therefore able to operate without constraint after 2020. In these circumstances all coal plants are projected to have closed by 2022 due to economic factors (see figure 3).
Or, as I read it, the governmental requirements for plant emissions are such that, in combination with the price of coal, they become economically unviable.
Here’s hoping the bigger burners of coal are working towards this goal.
