The uncomfortable truth about the end of UK coal
The Spectator doubts claims that the UK’s end of coal use will inspire the rest of the world:
Firstly, if the rest of the world is going to be inspired by the decommissioning of Britain’s coal-fired plants there is little sign of it yet. China last year generated over 60 per cent of its electricity from coal. Many of these emissions end up being embedded in consumer products used in Britain. China is not the most coal-intense economy, either. South Africa generates around 80 per cent of its power in this way, India 75 per cent and Indonesia 60 per cent. These are big users.
Britain may have managed to displace coal with a combination of gas and wind power, with a small contribution from solar (4.9 per cent last year), but it is not a practical course for many countries which do not have easy access to gas supplies, and who would have no other practical means of coping with the intermittency of wind and solar. The advantage of coal is that it is very easy to transport, store and stockpile. Gas is much more difficult in this respect. We have learned how to transport gas by ship in liquified form – thankfully, because the energy crisis which followed the Ukraine invasion would have been a lot worse without it – but this is expensive and requires dedicated terminals. To store gas requires large volumes of tank space, or underground caverns such as the Rough gas storage facility, which was closed in 2017 because of its high maintenance costs – and then reopened in a hurry in 2022. Coal, by contrast, can be stored pretty well anywhere.