The Case For Coal

Andrew Montford writes:

Whisper it, but it is becoming clear that the UK is going to have to start building coal-fired power stations again.

The reality is that we now face a very real risk of blackouts in the next few years. The warning signs are already flashing red. At the start of 2025 there was a (very) “near miss”, when, in the middle of a “dunkelflaute” — a period in which both solar and wind are generating essentially nothing — grid managers found themselves left with no reserve capacity. A fault on a single power station anywhere on the system could have forced them to impose rolling blackouts.

We should discount official claims that everything is fine. Those who watch these things closely understand that NESO has a dangerously lackadaisical approach to electricity grid security. While the gas grid is expected to withstand a 1-in-50-year cold winter, our power system is only required to withstand an “average cold spell”. That simply isn’t good enough.

A shortage of reliable generation capacity to see us through the winter is not the only threat. Grid insiders warn that a combination of low consumer demand and high proportions of renewables in the generation mix is destabilising the grid in the summer months too. Get this wrong and the whole country could lose power. This was exactly what happened with last year’s Iberian blackout.

As the Spanish and Portuguese know to their cost, blackouts bring economic and social chaos, and even death. A dozen direct fatalities have been identified across the Iberian peninsula, and statistical analyses suggest that more than a hundred premature deaths may have resulted.

So we really, really don’t want blackouts. Unfortunately, Ed Miliband is more relaxed about grid security. In fact, he wants more renewables on the grid, despite the fact that it is wind and solar that have got us to this sorry state in the first place.

What we actually need is more firm capacity — which is to say real power stations — and because as much of a third of our existing reliable generation capacity is due to be retired over the next few years, we need it very quickly.

That rules out nuclear, which is notorious for very long lead times (and troubled construction and epic cost overruns to boot). Hopes are therefore generally pinned on delivering a new generation of gas-fired power stations, but these turn out to be equally problematic. The AI revolution has led to a wave of new data centres being constructed across the world, and demand for the gas turbines that will power them has soared. The industry hasn’t been able to keep up, and lead times for new turbines are said to be between four and seven years. Add on the time required for new power stations to clear the UK’s burdensome permitting process and gas turbines stop looking like any part of the solution.

In other words, coal is the only option on the table.

We are not alone. America has just announced that it is going to build new coal plants, Germany and Italy have already announced plans to reopen mothballed ones, and the black stuff is seeing a resurgence across Asia. Our situation is much more difficult though, the last government having decided to demolish rather than mothball coal plants.

Coal-fired power stations are anathema to the climate cult, of course. When I mentioned the possibility of its return to the UK grid in a public forum last year there were audible gasps from the green contingent in the audience.

But there is simply no choice. We must have more firm power.

We should note in passing that modern coal plants are extremely clean — China’s standards for ultra-low emissions coal are far, far tighter than what the UK allows the Drax biomass plant to pump out. Coal is nowadays also very efficient and therefore surprisingly cheap to run.

Moreover, because the fuel is easy to store, coal has important energy and national security advantages. Better still, the UK has vast unexploited resources, albeit now mostly only accessible through deep mining. In an increasingly unstable world, a rehabilitation of coal-fired power starts to look less like a long-shot and more like a no-brainer.

However, these are rational considerations, and rationality is in short supply across society. So it’s hard to imagine that the climate cult, which dominates every institution of society, will willingly accept the return of coal-fired power, or indeed pretty much anything that could keep the lights on.

So even if we do manage to elect a government that wants to change direction, it will be fought every step of the way. What chance do we really have to get the reforms required through the House of Lords, packed to the gunwales with eco-warriors? I’d hazard a guess that even if we are getting blackouts, they would still try to prevent change. They are that mad, that dangerous.

Svante Arrhenius first theorised about anthropogenic global warming in 1896, and Margaret Thatcher was briefed about it by Sir Crispin Tickell, the then Deputy Under-Secretary of State for Economic Affairs at the Foreign Office. Thatcher always credited Tickell with having convinced her, leading to her speech on the subject to the Royal Society in 27 September 1988, the point at which the agenda of his 1977 Climatic Change and World Affairs entered the political mainstream. Tickell’s briefing of Thatcher was in 1984, tellingly the year that the Miners’ Strike began.

Thatcher began to blather on about environmentalism as a means of Socialist control once she had the dementia that also turned her into a born again Eurosceptic, but she was very Green indeed as Prime Minister, shocking first the Royal Society, and then the United Nations General Assembly, with her passion on the subject. By the time of her speech to the UN on 8 November 1989, she had made Tickell the British Ambassador to it, and the United Kingdom’s Permanent Representative on its Security Council. Johnson described Thatcher’s destruction of the coal industry as “a big early start” towards Net Zero. Her milk-snatching is now held up as a pioneering strike against the wicked dairy industry, as I had been predicting for many years.

To equip us to fight a war if necessary, but primarily to keep us out of wars, we need a complete change of direction, beginning with the lifting of the ban on further exploration of North Sea oil and gas. We need to harness the power of the State to deliver an all-of-the-above energy policy based around civil nuclear power and this country’s vast reserves of coal. Around those twin poles of nuclear power and of clean coal technology, let there be oil, gas, lithium, wind, solar, tidal, and everything else, bathing this country in heat and light. This is why we have a State. There is always climate change, and any approach to it must protect and extend secure employment with civilised wages and working conditions, encourage economic development around the world, uphold the right of the working class and of people of colour to have children, hold down and as far as practicable reduce the fuel prices that always hit the poor hardest, and refuse to restrict travel opportunities or a full diet to the rich. In Britain, we must be unequivocal about regretting the defeat of the miners in 1985. Is Kemi Badenoch? Is Nigel Farage? Is Ed Davey? Is Zack Polanski?

We sent our manufacturing to India and China, yet we have the gall to criticise their carbon emissions. And we expect to depend for energy on the Sun, the wind and the tides, precisely because it is beyond our power to stop them from doing what they do and we just have to live with it, yet we also expect to be able to stop climate change rather than finding ways of living with that. China manufactures most of the  world’s solar panels, which should be on buildings rather than on farmland and which we need to start making here, but let there be solar, wind and tidal energy in the mix. The base of that mix is nuclear and coal. The coal without which there can be no steel, and thus no wind turbines or tidal turbines, just as there could be no rigs, pipelines, or power stations. Britain stands on one thousand years’ worth of coal, and was the world leader in clean coal technology until the Miners’ Strike. Again, do not vote for anyone who will not say that the miners were right. Does Andrew Rosindell, whose constituency office is called Margaret Thatcher House, say that? Does Robert Jenrick, who gave his daughter the middle name Thatcher? Not Margaret. Thatcher.

Fracking? There is no problem with any energy source in principle, but none of that shale gas has turned up yet, and if it is anywhere, then it is in heavily populated areas that could do without the earthquakes, the poisoned water, and all the rest of it. Any economic arrangement is a political choice, not a law of physics, and the “free” market cannot deal with climate change while defending and expanding our achievements. That is precisely why it is being promoted. But instead, we need the State, albeit a vastly more participatory and democratic State than has often existed. The energy sources to be preferred are those which provided high-wage, high-skilled, high-status jobs.

The standing charges on gas and electricity are 50 times the cost of maintaining the networks, and although they are supposed to protect the suppliers from going bankrupt, not only have they repeatedly failed to do so, but they have never come down when those suppliers have been eye-wateringly profitable. Thanks to the all-of-the-above energy policy, just abolish them. And thanks to the all-of-the-above energy policy, let there be an all-of-the-above transport policy based around public transport free at the point of use, including publicly owned railways running on the electricity that public ownership would also supply to charging points in every neighbourhood and village. Astonishingly, and yet not, the fewest charging points for electric vehicles are in the coalfield areas. Also, never forget that, when we can catch them, buses carry far more passengers than trains do, but those passengers tend not to be politicians or the “opinion-forming” sort of journalists. And so on. Let a thousand flowers bloom. In a garden well-tended and well-watered as an expression of democratic sovereignty.