Great share by John Baez about the decline and soon-to-be disappearance of coal as an energy source in England. If only the same could be said of the USA. I know that coal is definitely on the decline, but the idiot occupying the White House is trying to bring it back. Grrrrrr!!!!
Originally shared by John Baez
Say goodbye to coal
In 1974, Britain got 80% of its electricity from burning coal. By 2011 that had dropped to 40%. Last year it was 9%. This summer it was less than 2%. And by 2025, if not sooner, all British coal-burning power plants will be closed!
Thanks in part to this, the amount of carbon dioxide produced by power generation in the UK dropped 50% between 2010 and 2016.
This marks the end of an era… an era that started with the dawn of the Industrial Revolution! Let’s look back at it with the journalist Fred Pearce:
Coal was the foundation of Britain’s rise as the dominant global power in the 18th and 19th centuries. It became the engine of the modern industrialized and urbanized world.
That revolution began with the steam engine – a coal-fueled device for powering a piston by alternately creating and condensing steam. The first steam engines were developed by a lowly English ironmonger named Thomas Newcomen in 1712, and refined a few years later by the more famous Scottish mathematician, James Watt.
Coal-burning steam engines liberated manufacturing industries like textiles from reliance on water wheels. They allowed factories to grow in size and to be built anywhere. As author Barbara Freese put it in Coal: A Human History, coal power “concentrated the factories and workforces in urban areas [and] allowed the industrialization of Britain to gain a momentum that was nothing short of revolutionary.”
The first great industrial cities, such as Manchester in northwest England, grew by gorging on coal. Coal fuelled giant blast furnaces to smelt iron, steam locomotives that connected cities, and the steam ships that allowed a collection of small offshore European islands to become the “workshop of the world” and to create an empire that at one point covered a quarter of the globe.
By 1830, Britain was producing 80 percent of the world’s coal, and most of the world’s iron. In 1850, its industrial CO2 emissions were six times greater than the next highest nation, the United States.
Then came electricity generation. Britain and coal pioneered that too. The first power station, built by Thomas Edison with coal in its boilers, began powering street lights in central London in January 1882. Edison followed up in New York later that year. Soon, coal-fired electricity was the industrial world’s power source of choice — and coal took electricity generation to ever corner of the planet.
With coal came pollution. London became known as the “big smoke.” In 1952, an estimated 10,000 people died in the capital during a “peasouper” smog. Long before the world became seriously concerned about coal’s contribution to climate change, Europe was worried about acid rain caused by coal burning. British power stations were discovered to be killing fish a thousand miles away in the lakes of Norway.
Coal’s decline in Britain began slowly, with a slump in domestic coal mining that started in the early 1950s and accelerated from the 1980s on. Deep British mines once produced most of the world’s coal. But the last of them shut in 2015, and today only a handful of small strip mines live on. For a while, imports substituted. [The big power plant] Drax burned coal from Russia and Colombia. But in the past five years, burning coal of any provenance has become increasingly uneconomic.
Britain’s National Grid buys nuclear and renewable energy first. Thanks in part to carbon taxes and government price guarantees, they are the cheapest. Since mid-2015, when the government doubled carbon taxes, natural gas also became cheaper than coal, because it produces only around half as much CO2 for every watt of power. Gas now produces about a third of the country’s electricity.
But the big story is the rise of renewables. In particular, Britain has pioneered giant offshore wind farms, with each turbine able to generate 8 megawatts. The price of energy from offshore wind has halved in five years, and it is now lower than either nuclear or gas.
Let’s not get too happy yet: a lot more electric power in the UK still comes from gas than from renewables! And the Drax power plant mentioned above will switch to burning wood chips shipped all the way from the US — an idiotic move based on the bureaucrats’ somewhat confused love affair with biofuels. When I last checked, back in 2013, the largest officially “renewable” source of power in the EU was wood:
https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2013/09/18/the-eus-biggest-renewable-energy-source/
But most of the energy production trends in the UK are in the right direction, and they’re speeding up.
#savetheplanet
http://e360.yale.edu/features/in-a-stunning-turnaround-britain-moves-to-end-the-burning-of-coal