Why ditching coal is an own goal

THIS is the end of King Coal: Great Britain, the crucible of the industrial revolution, has become the first major country in the world to set a date to stop burning coal to keep the lights on.

Energy Secretary Amber Rudd named 2025 as the year that the last coal-fired power station would have to shut.

Most of the coal now burned in British power stations has long come from the US, Russia and Colombia. The UK’s last deep coal mine, Kellingley in North Yorkshire, is set to close by Christmas. Globalisation means it is cheaper for power stations to buy coal from overseas in dollars and ship it to the UK rather than pay in sterling to truck it a few miles down the road from a British pit. Russian oligarchs like Andrey Melnichenko of the Siberian Coal Energy Company – who does a nice line in Philippe Starck-designed megayachts – have their finger on the UK’s light switch now, not Arthur Scargill.

Rudd’s move is bad news for the likes of Drax, the UK’s biggest coal-fired power station, which saw £40million wiped off its stock market value in 30 minutes. But it is also a risk for the rest of us. Coal provides 30 per cent of the UK’s power needs – it’s cheap, reliable and works on windless, overcast days when wind turbines and solar panels struggle.

Rudd wants gas – and nuclear, controversially funded by China, and renewables, of course – to replace coal because it produces about half the carbon emissions. But investment in gas-fired power stations has ground to a halt and existing plants have been mothballed because they are losing money. The Government’s scheme to incentivise energy firms to build more gas plants instead led to a surge in diesel generators because oil is so cheap it can undercut gas.

What happens if we fall out with our friends in Qatar who supply a quarter of our liquefied natural gas now? Or the Dutch, who supply 15 per cent of our gas, decide to cut production again? Coal – British in the last resort – was always a backstop for us; not any more.