Renewables Guru Predicted In 1863 That U.K. Would Ditch Coal Within 200 Years. Today Is That Day.
With today's decommission of the U.K.'s last coal-fired power plant at Ratcliffe-on-Soar in Nottinghamshire, the U.K. became the first G7 country to phase out coal power.
Incredibly, such an outcome was predicted at the height of the Industrial Revolution by a Northumbrian entrepreneur who made his vast fortune from coal-powered factories. At a meeting in London in 1863, Sir William (later Lord) Armstrong told fellow British Association for the Advancement of Science members that "England will cease to be a coal-producing country ... within 200 years."
Armstrong was the then president of the association, and his speech was well received, with Charles Darwin calling it "admirable."
However, in Armstrong's home city, famous for its carboniferous capitalism — the phrase "like taking coals to Newcastle" is still in widespread use — his belief in the end of coal would have been met with incredulity.
Coal, Armstrong told the assembly, was then "used wastefully and extravagantly in all its applications," and that cleaner, cheaper forms of electricity generation would be needed.
Armstrong — who made his substantial fortune from hydraulic cranes and the manufacturing of weapons of war — believed the future lay in harnessing the forces of water, wind, and sun. Long before the first photovoltaic panel, he calculated that "the solar heat operating on one acre in the tropics would ... exert the amazing power of 4000 horses acting for nearly nine hours every day" speculating that the "direct heating action of the sun's rays" might be used "in complete substitution for a steam engine."
Seven years after his British Association presidential speech, he created the world's first hydroelectric power scheme at his family home of Cragside, near Rothbury, Northumberland.
Armstrong understood that renewables would be cheaper energy sources in the long run compared to burning dirty coal, but his was essentially a lone voice. The presumed abundance of coal led to the commissioning of the world's first coal power plant in 1882. The U.K.'s coal plants have since burned through 4.6 billion tonnes of coal, emitting 10.4Gt of CO2, stresses Dr Sim Evans , deputy editor of Carbon Brief.
Coal provided 80% of the U.K.'s electricity in 1990, and still accounted for 39% as recently as 2012. Now it's zero.
Last year, 34.7% of the U.K.'s electricity was generated from gas, 32.8% from wind and solar, 11.6% from bioenergy, and 13.8% from nuclear. Just 1% was generated by the burning of coal.
The U.K.'s phase-out of coal was scheduled for 2025, but this was brought forward by a year by then-prime minister Boris Johnson at the COP26 UN Climate Summit in Glasgow.
"There were those who warned of blackouts as coal disappeared from the power system," said Jess Ralston, head of energy at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, "but their predictions of doom have been proven wrong again and again."
Likewise, it's the end-of-coal prediction of Lord Armstrong given to scientists in his soft Northumbrian burr in 1863 that has stood the test of time.
