Mighty, Irreplaceable Turbines

Peter Hitchens writes:

Hurrying along the icy platform to catch the night express to a city that no longer exists (Leningrad, in this case), I suddenly caught a whiff of one of the most evocative, nostalgic perfumes in the world – the sharp, thrilling scent of burning coal. I looked around in amazement.

Could the Soviet railways still be using steam engines in the early 1990s? Was I to be hauled through the frozen night behind some vast black Communist locomotive with a red star on its boiler?

No, the whiff of coal came from the samovars in the 'soft class' sleeping cars, all of them still fuelled by coal, for the typical Russian reason that they always had been, so why not?

Each extra-wide carriage had its grumpy provodnik, a well-wrapped woman of an unknown age who handed out the blankets, and for four kopeks (about 1 per cent of nothing) would draw you off a glass of black tea from the samovar, in a beautiful silver holder.

I mention all this because I think people forget that coal can be a likeable fuel. In modern times it is cursed as a polluter and a wrecker of the atmosphere, but it did not feel quite like that when we still used it a lot.

My generation were the last to live in houses with coal fires, the last to listen to our fathers trying not to swear as they used various odd methods to get the coal to light.

My favourite of these involved holding an old-fashioned broadsheet newspaper across the fireplace, to improve the updraught. When this (frequently) went wrong, the whole paper would catch fire and go whirling up the chimney.

You've all read about the lovely, captivating glow of the coals in the grate, of the occasional violent crack as a cinder shot out on to the hearth rug, perhaps of the sigh of the kettle always on the hob (my grandfather had one of these) or the sleepy rustle of the embers dying at bedtime.

They're all true, and I mention them to explain one of the many reasons why no amount of Green Zealots will ever persuade me that coal is an evil fuel. It was beautiful, as steam engines were beautiful and steelworks were beautiful too, especially by night.

And it was very useful and surprisingly efficient. It still is.

Yet we treat it as if it is a poison. So at the end of this month, Britain's last coal-fired power station, at Ratcliffe-on-Soar, in Nottinghamshire, will be shut, thanks to a spiteful green decree which more or less outlaws it.

Its 650ft chimney is a landmark for travellers on the M1 motorway and has been for almost 60 years. Since 1968, it has produced enough electricity to supply the needs of two million people. It burns more than five million tons of coal a year, and once used up two-thirds of the production of South Nottinghamshire's now-closed pits.

It is a relic of an age when this country was still an industrial nation, an age which for many who experienced it rather prefer to its current state.

But in fewer than four weeks it will damp down its last fires and die. If experience is anything to go by, it will soon afterwards be stripped to the bone, and then its giant chimney will be blown up, an assertion of dogmatic certainty which makes my blood run cold. Wouldn't it make more sense to mothball its mighty, irreplaceable turbines and keep it, just in case? What if we need it again, as we needed it in a hurry last January?

In that predictably chilly month, the wind predictably failed to blow and the sun predictably failed to shine, so all four of its generating units had to be run at once for the last time to get the nation through the cold weather.

And what if that happens again in January, or we get another of those devastating long, snow-heaped winters like the one in 1962-1963? Look at the films of that endless, searing freeze and see how it was in fact coal that kept the country from shutting down completely.

Ah, the Net Zero believers will say, but coal-fired power stations create CO2 and so create global warming. Perhaps. I'm open to the belief. It might be true. But even if it is, these measures make no sense. The UK's whole electrical generation capacity, in all forms of power, is 85 gigawatts. If we gave up using electricity entirely, it would make no difference to the impact of Chinese coal burning.

Bear in mind that Ratcliffe-on-Soar produces over two gigawatts (GW) of power, and emits perhaps 10 million tons of CO2 a year. Britain's coal power stations never produced CO2 on the scale attained in recent years by the big new energy superpowers.

China has the highest installed capacity of coal power plants in the world. As of July 2023, it ran coal-fired power plants with a capacity of over 1,100 gigawatts, about 500 times the size of Ratcliffe-on-Soar.

The last time I was in China, in Inner Mongolia, I watched in wonder as some of the longest trains in the world came roaring past me, all filled with coal from that region's recently opened coalfields. And let us not forget India, also busily building coal-fired power stations to propel it into the economic superpower status it so desires.

There is another thing about coal-powered electricity. It is less prone to power cuts than wind or solar energy.

Put simply, coal's strong, regular generators produce a current that is heavier, has more inertia and is less likely to trip when things go wrong. Special devices have been developed to try to overcome this in renewables. We shall see how well they work in years to come.

In any case, if it were not for carbon-rich, deeply 'unGreen' gas power, the system would not be able to run at all.

The zealots want to get rid of gas too. And they think they know how to do so.

We will find out if they are right in the early 2030s, when we will discover if wind and solar power can in fact step in to replace the many gas plants that are due to retire around then.

The 2030s could be an interesting decade. For in 2029, a supposedly coal-free Britain will have to stop hypocritically importing coal-fired electricity from the Netherlands – when that too is supposed to come to an end.

And what, by then, will have happened to our neglected, bungled nuclear power effort?

I suspect that, when the current climate change dogma has gone the way of so many other frenzies (in 1974 the same sort of people, backed by the BBC, were predicting a new ice age with the same sort of vigour), we will turn back to coal, at least in power stations – it is what all the really modern countries are doing.

And perhaps people such as me might be permitted a coal fire again, too, when we are old and grey and full of sleep.