On the first of October this year, something momentous didn’t happen. For the first time in 140 years, coal wasn’t burned to generate energy in the UK.


It happened because the UK’s last coal-fired power station closed down. Ratcliffe-on-Soar in Nottinghamshire began generating energy in 1967. It powered two million homes and produced enough energy in its lifetime to make over 21 trillion cups of tea. From now on, those cups of tea will be generated by other sources of energy. This is quite incredible when you


consider that in 2008 fossil fuels accounted for 80% of our electricity generation, most of that from coal, while renewables counted for less than 6%. Coal has been mined in Britain since before the Romans, but it wasn’t until the Industrial Revolution that burning coal became an essential part of Britain’s economy and ultimately the main source of our electricity. Today, there are just seven active coal mines left in the UK, while ‘more than half of our electricity [is generated] from low- carbon sources’ according to Hannah Ritchie, the author of Not the End of the World. The closure of Ratcliffe-on- Soar might represent a large full stop in Britain’s reliance on coal for electricity, but its coal mines and power stations are already showing the way to a more sustainable future. The legacy of hundreds of years of


Photo: Gateshead Council


intensive mining is a lot of holes in the ground. The Coal Authority says there are approximately 23,000 abandoned coal mines in the UK, and while not all of them can be reused, there are a few approaches that they’re particularly well-suited for.


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