MONITORING (SW) – The last coal-fired power station in the United Kingdom has officially closed down, book-ending the nearly 150-year history of British coal power.
The plan to decommission Ratcliffe-on-Soar station came after the then-Conservative government announced in 2015 that it intended to shut all UK coal-fired power stations by 2025 to reduce carbon emissions, reported ABC.
The local government began negotiating a plan in 2021 to redevelop the site and announced it in 2023. The station’s German owner, Uniper, later confirmed that all four of the station’s units would close by the end of September 2024.
The Ratcliffe-on-Soar station made its last energy delivery at the start of the British summer, supplying 500,000 homes for eight hours using 1,650 tones of coal.
A Uniper statement to the ABC clarified the station had been “operating as normal” until its closure, despite making no deliveries.
After closing, Ratcliffe-on-Soar is set to be dismantled “by the end of the decade”, according to Uniper.
In its place will be a new development — a “carbon-free technology and energy hub”, the company says.
The move makes the UK the first of the G7 nations to go entirely without coal-powered electricity, and is a symbolic step towards the country’s ambition to decarbonize electricity by 2030 and become carbon neutral by 2050.
Italy plans rid itself of its last coal-fired power stations by next year, with France following suit in 2027, Canada in 2030 and Germany in 2038.
