At the end of 2020, I published a report on solar power, wind power, and fossil fuel power market share changes from 2010 to 2020. A helpful reader, Mike Dyke, directed me to UK data for the same period.
Good bye, coal. Hello to natural sunlight being our dominant form of energy again.
As of writing, Great Britain has currently gone a whole fortnight without generating any electricity from coal, smashing all previous records and ringing the death knell for the country’s coal industry.
Great Britain is on its way to going 12 days without coal generating any electricity, smashing the previous record set only a few weeks ago and solidifying coal’s increasing irrelevance in the British energy mix.
The UK’s dwindling interest in coal-fired power has long been known, but it looks like the effects of the country’s coal phase-out are going to hit a monumental peak in 2018 as the country has surpassed 1,000 hours without using coal already in 2018.
The Netherlands has announced that it will ban the use of coal for electricity generation from 2030 onwards, and that the two oldest plants must close by the end of 2024, in a move that Germany utility company RWE has deemed “ill judged.”
Just days after setting a record of 55 hours without using coal, Great Britain has smashed a new record by going a total of 76 hours without any coal generation.
In a Tweet posted on Thursday, the UK’s electricity and gas owner National Grid confirmed that Great Britain had gone over 48 hours without any coal electricity generation, which was further confirmed to play out to be nearly 55 hours in total.
Provisional statistics from the UK Government have confirmed previous analyses that the country’s greenhouse gas emissions have reached levels not seen since 1890, thanks in part to the increase in electricity generation from wind and solar which together now account for the second largest source of electricity.
A new study published by researchers from Imperial College London and the University of Sheffield has shown that the UK’s ability to cut emissions from electricity production by 25% in 2016 could be used as a model for other countries to adopt and quickly reduce global carbon emissions by 3%.
