U.K., home of the industrial revolution, shuts its last coal-fired power plant

RATCLIFFE-ON-SOAR, England — If you are looking for a signal event, a real ping, to mark humanity's journey to slow global climate change, this is a thing.

On Monday, the very last coal-powered electricity plant in Britain is closing.

The coal age is over in the country that sparked the industrial revolution 200 years ago.

In a matter of hours, the boilers at the Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station — each the height of a 12-story building — will cool to the touch. The fireballs of pulverized coal that created the steam will go dark. The four 500-megawatt turbines will cease their once ceaseless spinning.

And the remnants of a once towering mountain of coal that powered the plant for 57 years will be a layer of dust ready to be swept away.

Chris Bennett, 64, is a senior electrical engineer at Ratcliffe. He's spent his life at coal plants.

"I'll be sad to see the end of it, to be honest," he said. "This was the industrial revolution, right here, when coal ruled everything."

He was quick to add, "But I am glad for the environment."

The plant will be decommissioned over the next two years. And then demolished.

The leftover brownfield will be turned into something else. Possibly a " zero-carbon technology and energy hub ." Plans are still being hammered out. The plant is owned by Uniper, one of the largest multinational energy companies in the world, headquartered in Germany. The company will continue to operate five electricity plants in the United Kingdom that are powered by natural gas.

That Britain would give up coal would have been unimaginable to previous generations, and to previous governments and captains of industries, who poured vast sums of capital and labor into the enterprise.

This was a country powered by coal — dug by a million miners, used to make cheap energy, to generate heat, then steam, then electricity. Coal heated the homes, ran the trains and made the steel and cement.

The first coal-fired electric plant in the world was built in England in 1882. The term "smog" was coined here, too.

Now Britain is the first in the global club of wealthy countries to quit coal — relying instead on natural gas, nuclear power and a combination of renewable energy sources.

Others in the Group of 7 will follow: Italy (2025), Canada (2030) and Germany (2038). Three-quarters of the 38 OECD countries, too, are expected to eliminate coal power by 2030.

The United States is also moving away from coal, though more slowly than climate advocates want. A quarter century ago, coal generated more than half the electricity in America. Today it accounts for about 18 percent.

Not only is the last coal plant in Britain going cold and dark, the United Kingdom is barely mining coal today. Plans to open the country's first deep coal mine in more than 30 years — to help produce steel, not electricity — were quashed by the High Court this month.

All the coal that has powered the Ratcliffe plant since 2014 has come from the United States and Russia. Since the Ukraine war began in 2022, supplies from Russia have been replaced by coal from South Africa and Australia.

Worldwide, coal is far from gone. Top producers include China, India and Indonesia.

But the transition in Britain shows how quickly things can change.

A visitor arrives at the Ratcliffe plant in middle England via 90-minute passenger train from London. Step onto the station platform and you see eight soaring steam towers, once a symbol of British innovation and security. Today, what do they represent? They are set to be razed.

The sprawling plant is the size of Monaco — about 0.8 square miles.

Peter O'Grady is the plant manager. He is charged with ending the era. Like the other workers we interviewed at Ratcliffe in its final coal-burning days, he was proud, resigned, realistic.

"This will be the end," O'Grady told us over tea at the plant. "This has been a personal journey for me, as well as a national journey."

When the Ratcliffe generating station and a dozen sister plants were built in the 1960s, they were a marvel of their time — the vanguard of a nationalized energy grid designed to power Britain's economy.

O'Grady points out the people who built these plants were working with slide rules. There were no handheld calculators. Photos of the control room from the 1970s show not one computer screen. There were dials.

He imagines that the same ambition — the sheer scale of investment, effort, imagination — that was needed to "carbonize" Britain will be needed to "decarbonize" it.

The construction of Ratcliffe began in 1963 and was completed in four years. Few big things are built that fast today.

The plant was capable of producing 2,000 megawatts of power on demand. The generators ran 24/7 for many years. Recently they provided the bursts of power needed when Britain's solar and wind generators flagged.

Asked to calculate how much carbon dioxide the plant has emitted in its history, O'Grady declined, though he conceded that there were plenty of estimates out there.

Environmental groups — who staged large protests at the plant in 2009 — claimed Ratcliffe was emitting 8 to 10 million tons of CO2 a year back then, equal to the emissions from about 2 million cars. Carbon Brief , a UK-based website specializing in climate, reported that a 2 gigawatt plant like Ratcliffe could have been outgassing 15 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalents a year, running full out.

On our tour of the plant, we were taken to see the boilers and generators. There were few workers around. About 170 staffers have been running the plant. About 120 will decommission it.

Bennett, the electrical engineer, told us he was born in a village with three job opportunities: working in a coal mine, working on the railroads or working at a power plant. "I'm glad I chose a power station," he said.

He said no one talked about greenhouse gases when he began to work in coal plants.

Back in the day, the public and regulators worried about classic pollution: the sulfur and nitrogen oxides that make acid rain.

Bennett remembers, years ago, a former company executive coming by the plant to calm workers about the prospect of being replaced by newfangled "wind farms," saying, "Lads, you got nothing to worry about." Turns out wind now accounts for a third of British electricity.

Bennett said, "My era was to keep the lights on and work double shifts."

He said he was looking forward to retirement.

One of his colleagues, Chris Bellaby, 34, is a turbine team leader. He's been here 11 years.

What did he think about the end? "We all knew it's got to happen. But it's still emotional for a lot of people, including me."

He said the teams worked hard to keep the plant running well — "blood, sweat and tears" — and that "we're proud that it's been reliable and safe."

Bellaby said everyone at the plant understood climate change and the role of carbon dioxide, but he was a little skeptical that wind and solar alone could today power a country, and wondered which fossil fuels will help fill the gaps when it isn't windy or sunny.

We stood inside one of the boilers, already being decommissioned. It was a profound place. Few people have ever been inside. There is no door. When workers were sent in every few years for repairs, an entry was cut through the steel.

O'Grady took us over some signage erected for the families of workers who recently toured the plant. Each boiler burned 200 tons of coal an hour, producing enough thermal energy to bring the water in an Olympic swimming pool to a boil in 11 minutes.

"It's been an interesting arc," O'Grady said. The plant had gone from a "cherished part of the community," a vital asset delivering electricity to home and hospitals, to something viewed as harmful, even sinister.

"Clearly as carbon became something we needed to fix, we became a target," he said.

In the early days of the plant, through the 1970s and beyond, there was a simple white fence to mark the perimeter of the facility. Eventually, that fence became higher and then electric, overseen by CCTV.

"We've helped people charge their iPhones and their electric cars," O'Grady said. "We've done our part."