Closing coal
Switching coal heat sources to clean - courtesy of Dr Staffan Qvist, Quantified Consulting
In August 2003 I helped launch Friends of the Earth’s first campaign to highlight the huge contribution coal fired power stations made to the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions. We published a website with details of the remaining 13 ‘carbon dinosaurs’ which at that time were making a bigger contribution to the power grid thanks to falling coal prices and rising gas prices, triggering a switch back to the old but resilient coal stations, many of which were built in the 1960’s.
The lack of a policy to address this situation was in part what triggered our broader campaign for a new legal framework for climate action in the UK. The Big Ask campaign was for a new Act of Parliament to enshrine short and long term targets into law, lifting them out of the political maelstrom and providing citizens and investors with reassurances that we were serious about a clean energy transition.
Nearly two decades later the UK’s remaining coal stations now operate only as back up and we regularly have periods of completely coal-free electricity generation. This is thanks to a range of factors - groups like Greenpeace effectively challenged and killed off any prospect of newer coal stations being built, through their Kingsnorth protests, environmental policies that capped traditional pollutants like Mercury and NOx added costs to the existing coal plant, new carbon pricing policies in Europe further eroded the economics and subsidies for clean alternative sources of power saw gigawatts of wind and solar being added to the grid kicking off dirtier forms of generation.
But over that same period coal use was ramping up hugely in other parts of the world, driving rapid economic development. Especially in Asia and, most notably, in China which is now home to over a 1,000 large coal fired power stations, contributing over half of all global ghg emissions from coal fired electricity. The same suit of policies could achieve similar results in terms of replacing coal but there are some fundamentally different circumstances which mean additional tools are likely to be needed.
Firstly, we time is now a much more critical factor - we need to see rapid reductions in global emissions, delivered yesterday. Heel dragging in rich economies (most notably in the US and parts of Europe) has meant we’ve burned through any remaining ‘safe’ carbon budget and are entering a period of devastating consequences. Secondly, availability of gas - the UK and US who have successfully closed down large parts of their coal fleets had an abundant source of homegrown, cheap natural gas deposits to replace them with. Topping up supplies from Norway and The Netherlands, Europe used what in retrospect now looks like a hugely naive pact with Russia, to wean itself partially off coal. China doesn’t have her own large gas fields and as everyone races to distance themselves from Russia’s gas exports competition for other sources is pushing up prices.
Thirdly, coal in China doesn’t just provide electricity but also heat. The lack of gas has meant a greater reliance on coal for district heating and ‘combined heat and power stations’ - these are much harder to replace with quick to install solar and wind generators.
This is why I have supported work to explore replacing coal boilers at newly built power stations with alternative sources of high temperature heat. Both nuclear and advanced geothermal technologies could do the job and, in my roles at Environmental Defense Fund Europe and the Quadrature Climate Foundation, I was pleased to fund studies in both Poland and China. Most recently I’ve joined Dr Staffan Qvist, the author of these studies, in exploring and promoting this idea more widely in Asia.
