MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Today marks the end of an era in Britain - the coal era. At midnight tonight local time in the U.K., a coal-fired power plant in the English Midlands will turn off its turbines. The skies above its giant smokestacks will clear and Britain will become the first major developed economy in the world to have phased out coal power. NPR's Lauren Frayer is outside that power plant right now and is with us live. Good morning, Lauren.
LAUREN FRAYER, BYLINE: Good morning, Michel.
MARTIN: So I'm listening to that. I'm hearing you. Is that the turbines I hear behind you? Are they literally going to flip a switch and turn those off?
FRAYER: Pretty much. I'm at the Ratcliffe-on-Soar power plant, smack in the middle of England, which has been burning coal since the late 1960s. I am watching steam vapor spew out of these, the top of these giant - eight of them - giant cooling towers that sort of dominate the landscape here. And this is the very last day that'll be happening. The U.K. opened the world's first coal-fired power plant in 1882. Now it's the first major economy to close its power plants when they flip that switch at midnight tonight.
MARTIN: I think we kind of think of Britain as the place that invented coal power, is that right?
FRAYER: Totally. I mean, coal power made modern Britain. It fueled the industrial revolution, the expansion of the British Empire. You know, this is where coal-fired steam engine was invented. Coal miners have played really an iconic role in British labor history. Until a generation or so ago, people burned coal in their fireplaces. That's literally how a lot of homes across the U.K. were heated.
MARTIN: So how have they managed to get out of the coal business?
FRAYER: So they kind of lucked out, actually, because they discovered natural gas in the North Sea in the 1960s and started switching to that. There's also, though, been huge investment in offshore wind plants. You know, despite the rain you can also probably hear behind me, solar actually works pretty well here, too. But this transition has coincided with globalization and the deindustrialization of the U.K.
So the U.K., frankly, just doesn't have that many big industrial factories to fuel anymore. Carbon pricing has made coal more expensive, though. They've built more nuclear plants. So it's a sort of collection of things here. But more importantly, like, the successive governments from rival political parties agreed on this and agreed on a timeline for it a decade in advance.
MARTIN: Well, you know, a decade actually doesn't sound that long given that long history of coal power that you were just telling us about.
FRAYER: It's not. No. So it shows how a really rapid coal phase-out is possible and could be a model for other countries. You know, just for context, the U.S. got about 16% of its electricity from coal last year. This country was at almost all, like 96% in the 1950s - has come down from that and will hit zero tonight.
MARTIN: So what's going to happen to this power plant that we hear behind you?
FRAYER: Yeah. So a lot of old power plants here have been repurposed to burn cleaner biomass fuel. This one's slated to be demolished in two years. Remember, though, all of the carbon from these smokestacks is still in the atmosphere. And because of how long the U.K. did burn coal, it bears a huge responsibility for climate change. The U.K. still gets about a third of its electricity from that other fossil fuel - natural gas, only slightly cleaner. The government set a pretty short deadline of 2030 to get rid of that, too.
MARTIN: That is NPR's Lauren Frayer in Nottinghamshire, England. Lauren, thank you.
FRAYER: Thanks, Michel.
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