At midnight on Monday, Britain’s last remaining coal-fired power station turned off its turbines. The closure of the Ratcliffe-on-Soar plant in Nottinghamshire brings to an end Britain’s 142-year reliance on the black stuff for generating electricity.
The end of coal is being celebrated by the political class as a sign of Britain’s ‘leadership’ on the climate. Apparently, this is a mark of our ‘progress’ towards a greener, cleaner future. Indeed, politicians were so eager to shut Ratcliffe down that the deadline for its closure was actually brought forward by a year by Boris Johnson’s Conservative government, ahead of the 2021 COP26 climate talks in Glasgow.
