It could hardly be more symbolic – Britain’s last coal-fired power station, the 2 GW Ratcliff-on-Soar plant near the M1 motorway in the industrial East Midlands, is to close at the end of September in line with UK government policy to end coal-fired power generation. For a plant that has generated power since 1968, the end has been a long time coming. Ratcliff now stands alone as a large-scale coal-to-power plant in Britain, today burning imported rather than UK-mined coal, of course. Come the autumn, Britain’s 150-year coal age will belong to the past.

But the Ratcliff site will eventually host its own contribution to the energy transition if the current operator, Germany’s Uniper, succeeds in its plans to develop a facility to produce hydrogen, both blue and green, later this decade to supply local industry and transport. Across Europe, the company – formed from the break-up of E.ON in 2016 – aims to become carbon-neutral by 2040 by ‘exiting coal, expanding our portfolio of green and flexible power, and converting to greener gases’.

Uniper is not alone – indeed, in much of Europe and also North America, coal is on its way out and the local power companies are steadily moving towards renewables, hydrogen and all things green. Last year’s Statistical Review of World Energy (now published by the Energy Institute) confirms that coal consumption in North America and Europe declined by 7% and 3% respectively during 2022.

But the global picture is very different. Total coal production increased by over 7% to a record high during 2022, again according to the Statistical Review. But the trends in just three Asian countries were such that China, India and Indonesia accounted for almost all (95%) of the increase in global production that year. Likewise, global coal consumption rose by 0.6% to its highest level since 2014, largely driven by China and India again.

Clearly, things are different in South East Asia, and this helps to explain why, despite wind and solar power growing in leaps and bounds around much of the world, global carbon emissions from energy continued to rise – by 0.9% in 2022, says the Statistical Review. New numbers for 2023 will be available in June.

The problem, as one UK academic wrote last year, is simply that Asia’s economic growth is powered by coal, and coal and gas-powered generation is still the global backbone of global power generation. It’s easy, watching the growth of renewables from Europe or the US (see Ratcliff-on-Soar) to assume otherwise, but the world is using more electricity than ever before, particularly in Asia, so global fossil fuel use is also still rising, albeit slowly.

This despite an approximate flatlining of electricity use in the richer, OECD, countries, where virtually no new coal plants are planned and new renewable generation is filling the generation gap.

Despite wind and solar power growing in leaps and bounds around much of the world, global carbon emissions from energy continue to rise.

Globally, new wind and solar plants have only slowed the rise in fossil fuel burning. For the moment, the replacement of fossil fuels by renewables in developed economies has been too slow to offset rapid growth in fossil-fuelled electricity use in parts of Asia.

Optimists suggest that this will eventually change, as economic activity cools in Asia, and as the global growth of renewables accelerates yet further.

The International Energy Agency’s Executive Director Fatih Birol is one of the optimists, suggesting in a recent article that it’s now cheaper to build onshore wind and solar power projects than new fossil plants almost anywhere worldwide. He also writes that fears of shortages of the rare minerals necessary for clean energy technologies are receding; and that recent concern over the security of fossil fuel supplies has added another reason to choose reliable, local renewables.

Birol is not alone – BloombergNEF’s highly influential Michael Liebreich published his Net Zero will be Harder Than You Think and Easier. Part II Easier analysis in February. He lists five technical forces that bode well, but points to another ‘superpower’ – Liebreich is convinced that society has reached a tipping point beyond which it is unthinkable not to deal with climate change. Indeed an optimist.

Yet pessimists worry that turning this particular oil tanker – achieving net zero anytime soon – will take too long, delaying any impact on global CO₂ emissions and consequent (and disastrous) changes to the climate. Leibreich himself ends his otherwise optimistic analysis by asking the question: ‘Will we get there in time?’

The views and opinions expressed in this article are strictly those of the author only and are not necessarily given or endorsed by or on behalf of the Energy Institute.

• Further reading: ‘Green transformation of Spain’s largest coal plant’. Spanish utility Endesa plans is planning emissions-free generation from its As Pontes coal plant by 2040.
• Find out how growing coal approvals in China are ‘constricting’ space for energy storage solutions.