Explainer
Is the UK still burning coal for electricity?
No - Great Britain's last coal power station closed on 30 September 2024, ending 142 years of coal-fired electricity. What happened, and what a permanent zero looks like in the data.
Right now on the GB grid
Generating 24.2 GW, 47.0% of it wind, at 76 gCO₂/kWh (low), importing 3.0 GW over the interconnectors.
As of 2026-08-25 00:43:39 UTC · watch it live
No. Great Britain burned its last coal for electricity on 30 September 2024, when Ratcliffe-on-Soar in Nottinghamshire shut down for good. It ended 142 years of coal-fired power - the fuel the grid was literally built around - and made GB the first major economy to finish a complete coal phase-out. The coal slice of the live mix reads 0% today because the answer is genuinely zero, not because data is missing.
How fast it collapsed
The remarkable part is the speed. As recently as 2012, coal supplied around 40% of GB electricity. By 2017 the grid recorded its first coal-free day since the Victorian era; by 2020 coal-free months were routine. The records board keeps the milestones - the first coal-free day and the longest coal-free run, which has been running since the day Ratcliffe closed and now simply counts upward forever.
Three forces did it: the carbon price floor (from 2013) made coal’s emissions expensive; cheap gas and collapsing wind and solar costs undercut it; and a hard 2024 regulatory deadline removed any reason to invest in ageing plants. Coal went from baseload to seasonal stopgap to museum piece in twelve years - the full arc is in the history explorer.
What replaced it
Not one thing. Wind became the largest renewable source; gas remains the flexible backstop; biomass took over some converted coal units (Drax’s boilers now burn wood pellets - the biomass fleet shows them); interconnectors and batteries filled the balancing roles coal once played. The carbon consequence is visible in one number: grid carbon intensity averaged ~500 gCO₂/kWh in coal’s last dominant year and runs at roughly a quarter of that now.
For the station-by-station timeline of the closures, see the UK coal phase-out timeline.
Common questions
- So why does coal still appear on the dashboard?
- Because zero is data. The coal slice reads 0% because the answer is genuinely zero, not because it is missing - and the historic pages show the fall from 40% of the mix to nothing within a working lifetime.
- Could coal come back in an emergency?
- Not in practice. The stations have been closing and demolishing since 2015; the final winter contingency coal units were released after 2023-24. There is no mothballed GB coal fleet to recall.
More explainers
- Carbon intensity, explained
- Embedded generation: the third of the grid you can't see
- How batteries balance the grid
- How interconnectors work
- How the UK electricity grid works
- The UK coal phase-out: a timeline
- What is curtailment - and why do wind farms get paid to stop?
- Why does the grid run at 50 Hz?
- Why electricity prices go negative