RATCLIFFE ON SOAR, Sept 18: Ratcliffe-on-Soar Power Station has dominated the landscape of the English East Midlands for nearly 60 years, looming over the small town of the same name and a landmark on the M1 motorway bisecting Derby and Nottingham.
At the mainline railway station serving the nearby East Midlands Airport, its giant cooling towers rise up seemingly within touching distance of the track and platform.
But at the end of this month, the site in central England will close its doors, signalling the end to polluting coal-powered electricity in the UK, in a landmark first for any G7 nation.
"It'll seem very strange because it has always been there," said David Reynolds, a 74-year-old retiree who saw the site being built as a child before it began operations in 1967.
"When I was younger you could go down certain parts and you saw nothing but coal pits," he told AFP.
Coal has played a vital part in British economic history, powering the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries that made the country a global superpower, and creating London's infamous choking smog.
Even into the 1980s, it still represented 70 percent of the country's electricity mix before its share declined in the 1990s.
In the last decade the fall has been even sharper, slumping to 38 percent in 2013, 5.0 percent in 2018 then just 1.0 percent last year.
In 2015, the then Conservative government said that it intended to shut all coal-fired power stations by 2025 to reduce carbon emissions.
Jess Ralston, head of energy at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit think-tank, said the UK's 2030 clean-energy target was "very ambitious".
But she added: "It sends a very strong message that the UK is taking climate change as a matter of great importance and also that this is only the first step."
By last year, natural gas represented a third of the UK's electricity production, while a quarter came from wind power and 13 percent from nuclear power, according to electricity operator National Grid ESO. —AFP
