UK to finish with coal power after 142 years | Hacker News Reader

UK to finish with coal power after 142 years

bbc.co.uk

73 pointsmhandley63 comments

We've had several power outages in our area recently, most of them JUST long enough that the food in our fridge was deemed unsafe and we had to toss some of it out.

This sort of thing really makes me think about the large scale deployment of rooftop solar and batteries. If we had a battery system in our house, we could have used it to intermittently cool the fridge/freezer and potentially save the food and avoid the waste. It seems to make more sense to have everyone have their own power generation capabilities than for all of us to rely solely on a broad network stretched thin.

I know very little about this subject, but the primary reason we haven't done it is that there aren't many subsidies around where we are. In addition, I often wonder about the future proofing on these systems. Our old house had coax run to every room because they just assumed you would be using cable tv instead of wireless streaming.

The reliability of the UK grid was 99.999998% in the past year.

The last time I can recall any long electricity cuts was during the 3 day week in the early 1970s... Which perhaps explains some of the reasons why coal power (or at least the people who produced the coal) were seen as a political threat:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Day_Week

NB I wasn't very old at the time and rather enjoyed the experience!

I'm in London, and I've only experienced two power outages in the last decade, each lasting less than a minute.

We have our problems, but electrical grid reliability is definitely not one of them.

I live in rural Scotland. Every power outage in the last 10 years has been caused by land developers not reading the local utilities plans and accidentally cutting through cables.

To be fair, the UK's "dial before you dig"-type services are next to useless.

I've tried to get plans for my house before digging, and UK Power Networks refused my request as I'm not authorised to see the plans apparently.

National Grid sent me a blank page with an empty square on it.

SGN were the only one that actually sent me a sensible map with what appeared to be accurate contents (insofar as they match where I thought they would be), but even they had a disclaimer on the document they sent me saying they can't be held liable for errors on the map and all digging should be performed by hand to confirm whether a pipe exists.

A lot of the major underground infrastructure owners (including Thames Water, BT, Sky, Virgin) just aren't signed up to the asset search services and you have to contact them manually to even find out if they have assets in your area.

Of those, only Thames Water actually replied to my email, and they said I'd either have to sling them several hundred pounds or drive down to their office in Reading and look at the archives in person. I did the latter, and the plans were just entirely wrong.

Ground Penetrating Radar isn't even an option in my area due to the soil composition. Seems like you just make your best guess and then hope for the best.

FWIW I am in London too and have had several more than that, some for more than a few hours. There was one just the other day where the RAF museum in London was partially shut because the power was still out from the night before, much to my kids' annoyance.

These have usually been down to a local substation going bang/being hit by a bus/curious-but-now-crispy-cat etc though, rather than the whole city going down. These sort of blackouts affect smaller areas, like 1000 houses at once or whatever, and not the entire city or region

Exactly, the reliability of home brew battery systems is likely to be quite a bit less.

That does not mean that day long power outages are impossible. Especially not locally.

For example, storm Arwen in 2022 left lots of communities without power for many days https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/publications/storm-arwen-report . Admittedly not because of power generation, but because of transmission lines being cut by falling trees.

In my country the power company gives out compensation for a power outage that lasts more than a few hours. This only happened to me once.

A battery alone is not enough. You also need an inverter that's capable of powering your house. Most are not.

They need to e.g. provide the proper frequency on their own and entirely/physically decouple from the grid etc.

They are available but just rooftop solar and a battery is not enough.

It depends on how much you want to run. Just keeping the fridge working and powering an internet router and a tv would go a long way and wouldn’t take much.

I think the easiest solution here would be one of many readily available UPS's. If the fridge/freezer is kept shut, it should just sip at the power.

Honestly hadn't considered that. It was bizarre here when the power last went out because it sounded like everyone was out mowing their lawns. Realized after a walk that it was all neighbors with gas generators.

I have a small UPS for my network stack and NAS. Hadn't considered one for my fridge, too.

Commodity hybrid PV inverters are now very capable of offgrid/island mode - I have one. If the grid goes down (which it does - I live rurally) I can flip a changeover switch and power my whole house from PV or battery up to a limit of 5kW, which is plenty to keep everything necessary running.

It’s not a mainstream feature and there’s a high setup cost but the tech is readily available and the price/kWh of home batteries is going down steadily.

> they just assumed you would be using cable tv

I think you mean - they just assumed you would be connecting to the antenna on the roof to get the 4 glorious full colour channels.

Just need a BEV with inverter, which many modern cars have, and a long extension cord.

This. Seeing a lot of great stories of EVs being very useful in the aftermath of hurricane Helen in US. The Ioniq 5 can power a house for 5 days for example. And is more cost effective (since you also use it as a car) than installing batteries at home. (Disclaimer not all EVs support V2L)

"In our area recently" — at least state the country!

You are commenting as if your experience is relevant to this news from Britain, but weasel out of even the roughest location. Your phrasing and choice of words is generally American.

Guilty as charged! American, unfortunately located in the southeast.

To be clear, this wasn't intended as a comment against or argument against the UK's accomplishment. I am EXTREMELY glad to hear they're moving away from coal.

Where? I'm in the UK. One of my network switches has 595 days of uptime so I haven't had power issues in at least that long, but it seems like more than 3 years since the last disruption when something blew at the substation round the corner and was fixed within minutes.

Then there is Drax a vast coal plant now burning wood chips cut from foreign forests, dried and shipped across the ocean in bunker oil fueled cargo ships. That counts as renewables. 7% of our electricity today, more than solar. I am actually very optimistic about the future in ten years of so. I think we oversell the present a bit though.

I'm not a fan of Drax (is anyone?), but I guess the alternative is worse, at least for now. In the short term, the marginal alternative is LNG, also shipped in oil-fueled cargo ships. So as we continue to build out wind and solar and reduce the amount of natural gas we burn, it's probably good to keep Drax on biomass. But it shouldn't be a long term solution.

>the marginal alternative is LNG, also shipped in oil-fueled cargo ships

LNG ships are usually fueled by natural gas evaporated from its liquefied payload, which is much cleaner than burning diesel.

The energy used to chill the LNG and methane leaks are the big question marks as to whether LNG is better or worse than coal. So it's far from a slam dunk that it'll be better than biomass.

Looking around at how much garbage people dump in the streets I am sure we could chuck some of that in Drax and close the loop a bit.

Drax is less than 4% of electricity now, it's been steadily dropping:

https://ember-climate.org/insights/in-brief/the-largest-emit...

So lower than solar now (which has been growing).

Could it be quantified how much UK is using coal power of other countries?

Since industry is moved outside, the products we consume use power of producer country, mostly China. Is there a correlation in reduction of local coal power and amount of energy intensive products imported?

It's all connected of course.

It's much easier to just look at the global consumption of coal. Peak coal usage was in 2022 (a brief spike caused by the Russian invasion of the Ukraine). With the exception of China and India, coal usage has declined pretty much everywhere. And in many western countries, like the UK and US it is being phased out rapidly; mostly for economical reasons. It's just no longer cost competitive.

China is still building coal plants but their usage seems to have peaked as well or be close to that as they have aggressively accelerated deployment of wind and solar there and are of course responsible for producing most of the growth of that. Also, there's a sense of urgency there because coal related pollution was making their cities unlivable. This is similar to what happened in the UK mid last century. Also, they are pursuing some aggressive short term goals to reduce dependence on coal.

That is a good point. Europe has since the 1970s actually cleaned up the continent pretty well by kicking out a lot of polluting industry.

(The latest target of environmentalists in the Netherlands was data centers. They used too much power, water whatever. So they went to the deserts of Spain. Epic win).

CO2 is about 20% higher when accounting for imports:

https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/united-kingdom#consum...

But both are still trending down.

On the flip side is really fair for a nation to claim their emissions aren't their responsibility because it was due to the production of exported goods? Would we accept that line from Germany if they decided to keep a coal plant open. "Oh, that's not our CO2, it's all going to make cars for China. It's their CO2". A little ubsurd when Germany gets rich off the sale. All the profit, none of the responsbility. If china wants to make our stuff I only think it's fair that they are responsible for the pollution caused by the production.

If anything else this narrative "exported CO2" muddies the water and makes it harder to hold nations to account. A basic "emissions in your borders are your responsibility to handle and reduce" is easy to understand, hard to game, and avoids this all devolving into CO2 accounting tricks.

What's interesting about 140 years is that there's probably quite a few people who are ~70 and their grandparents have seen the first coal power plant start up. It isn't really that long ago.

Such generator facilities need to be retained, and not demolished, for contingency purposes.

We don't need to keep coal for that. There is relatively clean by comparison gas stations for that. Or pumped hydro.

Or just build more wind and over provision

This is the plant that was retained. It was kept a little longer due to the problems with gas supply after Russia invaded Ukraine.

It's no longer needed for contingency.

The actual electricity production and consumption of the UK is declining [0] The UK is also rapidly deploying renewables, and adding more and more interconnection to mainland Europe.

So as the capacity goes up the consumption goes down (for now). It's completely fair to decommission all coal plants.

I assume the energy consumption will go up at some point, as there's only so much you can save with energy efficiency, an delocalisation, and as we shift primary energy usage onto electricity (what's currently being imported in the form of gas and petrol).

But hopefully by this point the continued growth of production means will cover the increase

0: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/energy?tab=chart&countr...

I had understood that one of the reasons for the reduction in consumption was related to having one of the highest priced electricity in the world. With more being deployed it should bring prices down too to allow increased consumption. Hopefully.

It really does make things uneconomic here, and painful for the poorer folks in society.

Burn the ships, we aren’t going back. Net zero is within reach, the evidence and data on this is clear.

Mostly replaced with gas, which is probably just as bad for climate change https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights...

Probably not.

https://group.met.com/en/mind-the-fyouture/mindthefyouture/n...

That one looks only at carbon emissions, which is not the main issue with Natural gas. The problem is that since it's a gas it leaks and natural gas in the atmosphere is a very very potent greenhouse gas.Though ofcourse over time in will break down to simple co2

At least it’s still lower on average than renewables at the moment [1]. I’m not sure what the current state of Nuclear Reactor construction is like, but hopefully we get some come online soon.

[1] https://grid.iamkate.com/

If no one has started any (other than mainly China? theres one in France) https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-fu..., why would they suddenly come online.

I feel like the internet hype machine for nuclear is like some dead hand machine gone wrong that doesn’t know nuclear is already dead.

It’s stories like these that tell us the United States wants to triple nuclear energy:

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/27/americas-coal-communities-co...

And restarting closed plants is becoming a thing

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/30/michigan-nuclear-plant-final...

I have read these same stories about "doubling" or "trippling" nuclear for more than 20 years.

In that 20 years there has been ~0 increase in US nuclear power generation, and in the UK it has halved.

Yeah, people wanted to greatly reduce CO2 emissions. The renewable crowd said we didn’t need it.

Now we’re way behind in reducing emissions. All these stories about AI needing electricity. Where’s the renewable solution?

Having worked in the industry, "the renewable crowd" were heavily pro nuclear.

Clean coal, clean gas, carbon capture, and the "nothing bad happens when you burn coal I would happily live next to a coal power plant" crowd are the real issue. That's the grift that keeps on grifting.

Actually nuclear has negative growth at this point. There are a lot of aging plants coming up for either closure or expensive investments needed to keep them going a bit longer.

>No new U.S. nuclear plants are currently being built.

If it was a good idea, plants would be being built. People with much more expertise than us have crunched the numbers and they can’t make it work. It’s too expensive and that’s why there are no new plants being built. No amount of internet proselytizing will change this.

Completely missing our emissions goals will change this attitude.

Both politicians and investors are too short-term in their motivations to use their actions to teach us anything.

It's clear the future is unreliable renewable (solar+wind) and batteries, with some pumped/hydro where it is geologically feasible. Because the renewables are so cheap to build, and the cheap renewables cause over-supply and the batteries are a cheap-steadily-getting-cheaper solution to that.

The tipping point comes when we need to start phasing out the base power for overnight and long bouts of bad weather.

So the pricing game to be made is, can nuclear be built cheap enough to compete with batteries for long-term base power?

Most likely to me is that nuclear will survive in places with worse weather (Nordic countries where the sun goes down for 3 weeks in winter) or poor geography (Japan), and sunnier places (like Texas, or most of the US even) will go full renewable+battery.

Culture war. The left is against nuclear so the right wants it.

Of course it never actually goes anywhere because money has no ideology only reality. Just years of studies and bureaucracy.

Hinckley point C is under construction in the uk and on track for 2026 opening

Edit: potentially delayed by some years

Definitely delayed to at least 2031 and probably beyond. It was never really on any track other than for the inevitable delays and budget overruns.

'Mostly' isn't true over the last decade which is the period of the most recent big shift from Coal.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-mix-uk

That graph shows gas is the most used fuel in the UK for all years since coal was the most

Mostly replaced implies >50% which is not the case. Gas is the most used fuel but has not 'mostly replaced' coal.

It's approx 50%, and it's more than any other.

1991 Coal 62% Gas 1.72% 2023 Coal 1.28% Gas 31.71%

So Coal dropped 60.72, Gas rose 30, oh no, it's slightly less than 50%, my point is invalid

The graph in the article makes clear that isn't really true. Around half of coal use was replaced by natural gas in the 1990s, as you say. That's still a win - same energy, but half the CO2 emmisions. But since 2010 or so, the remainder of coal use was largely replaced by renewables.

Now we just need to get rid of the remaining natural gas use. For electricity production, the trend here is pretty good. Natural gas won't disappear anytime soon, but there will be longer and longer periods where none is burned. But for home heating, I don't think gas will be phased out as fast as really needs to be done.

> In 2010, renewables generated just 7% of the UK’s power. By the first half of 2024, this had grown to more than 50%

Electricity not power just to be pedantic. Most power is still from directly burning gas and oil.

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