There is one coal fired plant remaining in the UK (Ratcliffe-on-Soar), roughly 1.5GW total capacity. A substantial portion of UK electricity consumption is now domestic wind, clean hydro from Norway, and low carbon nuclear from France.
Roughly 61% of electricity used came from low carbon sources over the last 12 months. The coal plant in question will be retired next year (October 2024).
Oh this is a lot less bleak than the title of the article suggested, as you can see I didn't actually read it. Anyway the irony is still palpable, I could almost taste it in the air when I saw the headline
The angle the press went with is that solar doesn't work when it's too hot so we need to fire up the coal. Except that day solar produced a third of the UKs power, one of its best days of the year and we didn't actually use coal after all. The entire premise of that press push was a serious distortion of reality.
