This is an astoundingly vapid article. If you want to understand why and how the UK has so quickly reduced the amount of coal it burns, Carbon Brief has a much more informative overview [0].<p>The basic explanation of what happened is simple: the UK instituted a carbon tax that made coal more expensive than natural gas per unit of electricity produced, so British utilities shut down their coal plants and replaced them with gas plants as quickly as possible.<p>The backstory is somewhat more complicated, and much more interesting. The British tax was implemented in 2013 as a local fix to a broken EU carbon-trading program; that program, called the Emissions Trading Scheme [1], allocated to electrical utilities in the EU the right to produce a fixed amount of carbon emissions (and carbon-equivalent emissions), and the rights were made transferable—a typical cap-and-trade set-up. And then the basic problem with that typical set-up occurred: the fixed supply of rights to produce emissions proved higher than the EU's electrical sector's total demand, a consequence mostly of lower than expected demand for electricity during the recession that followed the financial crisis of a decade ago, but also partly due to other clean-energy initiatives and to big changes in world energy markets. And so the price of emissions rights collapsed.<p>That wasn't really a problem—no more carbon was being pumped into the air than the ETS allowed—but it made plain the fact that the ETS was doing nothing at all to reduce emissions. So British lawmakers decided to implement their own carbon tax, called the Carbon Price Floor [2], in order to reduce emissions and support the development of clean energy. The tax rate Parliament set was one of the highest in the world, and as it turned out it was just high enough to make coal slightly more expensive than natural gas for generating electricity, an outcome entirely unforeseen when the policy was decided, just as global production of natural gas was beginning to boom and its price to plummet.<p>So in the end, a bunch of poorly designed policies and their unforeseen consequences led to a better than expected outcome: Britain has been weened off coal decades earlier than was thought possible.<p>0. <a href="http://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-uk-cuts-carbon-record-coal-drop" rel="nofollow">http://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-uk-cuts-carbon-record-co...</a><p>1. <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Emission_Trading_Scheme" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Emission_Trad...</a><p>2. <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/carbon-price-floor-reform" rel="nofollow">https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/carbon-price-floo...</a>
Having an interest in ethnomusicology, my favorite testimony of Britain's tumultuous dropping of coal is the song <i>Coal Not Dole</i>. It's originally a poem written by the wife of a laid-off coal miner. Dropping coal may be considered inevitable in retrospect - but it's interesting to see the perspective of people caught up in these changes, whose lives were disrupted and sometimes ruined in the process.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xk2hGp6HCn8" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xk2hGp6HCn8</a><p><pre><code> It stands so proud, the wheel so still
A ghost-like figure on the hill
It seems so strange, there is no sound
Now there are no men underground
What will become of this pit-yard
Where men once trampled, faces hard?
Tired and weary, their work done
Never having seen the sun
Will it become a sacred ground?
Foreign tourists gazing round
Asking if men once worked here
Way beneath this pit-head gear
Empty trucks once filled with coal
Lined up like men on the dole
Will they e're be used again
Or left for scrap just like the men?
There'll always be a happy hour
For those with money, jobs and power
They'll never realise the hurt
They cause to men they treat like dirt</code></pre>
Ontario has been coal-free for a few years:
<a href="http://www.ieso.ca/power-data/supply-overview/transmission-connected-generation" rel="nofollow">http://www.ieso.ca/power-data/supply-overview/transmission-c...</a><p>There are many confounding factors (recession in 2008-2009) but generally, the number of days with smog advisories has been on the decline in Ontario as well:
<a href="http://airqualityontario.com/history/aqi_advisories_stats.php" rel="nofollow">http://airqualityontario.com/history/aqi_advisories_stats.ph...</a><p>Note that in general, across North America (not sure about the world at large) electricity consumption per capita has also been on the decline, to the extent that overall/absolute electricity consumption is down in large areas like Ontario[1]. I haven't done any research, but I surmise this is due to factors like more energy-efficient devices and time-of-day usage being pushed onto the retail user. (In additional to the aforementioned recession causing loss of manufacturing/factories)<p>1. <a href="http://www.ieso.ca/power-data/demand-overview/historical-demand" rel="nofollow">http://www.ieso.ca/power-data/demand-overview/historical-dem...</a>
What's the deal with natural gas? It doesn't seem "renewable"; isn't it extracted just like petrol? Is it just that it burns cleaner? Doesn't burning it still produce carbon dioxide?
If you ever get the opportunity to visit a power station, you should definitely do so. I visited the coal-fired station in Tilbury when it was running and I was amazed at the sheer scale of the operation. The tour showed how the coal was processed, the water processing plant, the turbine hall, the control room and you could even stand at the bottom of an offline furnace and feel the incredible heat from the other furnace (connected by a tunnel).
Did this emerge from routine operations, or was there a directed effort to have a "coal-free day"? The article didn't seem to clearly say either way.
> Last year, the share of coal in total power generation dropped to 9 percent, down from 23 percent in 2015 and 40 percent in 2012.<p>How have they done this so quickly?
I wonder if they have data going back to the 1800s to actually back this up. In the 1970s, for example, the country faced day-long blackouts[0] due to industrial action by coal miners (I think limited electricity was still generated for hospitals etc. using existing coal stocks, but there were other sources of energy at the time such as nuclear power plants).<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Day_Week" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Day_Week</a>
Next up Germany and Poland, please.<p><a href="http://www.coalmap.eu/#/climate-problem" rel="nofollow">http://www.coalmap.eu/#/climate-problem</a>
Earth doesn't care where its coal gets burned
<a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_in_China" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_in_China</a>