The U.K. had its first full day without burning coal to make electricity since the Industrial Revolution more than a century ago, according to grid operator National Grid Plc. (emphasis added)
“Friday 21st April 2017 was the first 24-hour period since the 1880s where Great Britain went without coal-fired power stations,” the National Grid control room said in a Twitter post confirming the achievement announced earlier.
The country is getting half of its electricity from gas power plants, 30 percent from renewables and interconnectors and the remainder from nuclear plants, according to Duncan Burt, head of operate the system at National Grid.
The U.K. was an early adopter of renewable energy and has more offshore wind turbines installed than any other country, as well as fields of solar panels with as much capacity at seven nuclear reactors. The government aims to switch off all coal plants by 2025.
“It’s really down to the growing levels of renewables,” Burt said by phone. “We have solar and wind displacing traditional fossil fuels. We’ll start seeing these days more […]
R.I.P. Coal
E. F Schumacher who sat on the coal board of England wrote Small is Beautiful in 1973, over 50 years ago. The byline was:” A study of economics as if people mattered” which would be good if heard today. Neo liberals, neo cons, and technocrats all look at the numbers and say the economy is just fine.
Not at all true if you look at…. people, during what many now call the retail apocalypse.
Schumacher saw end of coal and with it the end of the industrial age, as we knew it, with big labor showing up in massive shifts. That is now gone. I do not believe he foresaw the robotic age which has eclipsed the previous one….. but do we? Can we digest that robots do quality work and can make things that last so we can get off all of this material churn? Can we imagine that? It implies a world where scarcity is not the driver. Try to put that in the old
protestant work ethic pipe and see if it smokes.
Business without customers does not work. Many human worlds worked just fine outside our model of scarcity, empire, massive energy use and militarism.
But if you begin to feel all comfy with the Brits going off of coal, just listen to what Rex Tillerson told the Foreign Affairs Council of Huston before he became Secretary of State.
Oops Tillerson is at World Affairs Concil at Dallas/Ft Worth