According to a report in The Conversation (LINK, republished below) by Grant Wilson, Great Britain generated 75% of its electricity from coal and natural gas in 2010. Now a decade later, these fossil fuels accounted for just 40%, with coal generation collapsing from the decade’s peak of 41% in 2012 to under 2% in 2019. Today natural gas is in the lead at 38%, followed by wind power at 21% and nuclear at about 19%.
Chart created by Grant Wilson, Lecturer in Chemical Engineering, University of Birmingham., University of Birmingham.
Full article re-publishe through Creative commons license:
According to several reports, coal power is losing its economic ground, and a lot of infrastructures may one day actually become stranded assesst totgether with recent, ongoing, and planned oil invest in pipelines, harbor faciliteis and refinereies etc.
As detailed analysis by Carbon Tracker analysis, 60% of the global coal capacity is uneconomic on a long-run marginal cost basis. Theis means that in the absence of changing circumstances (i.e., lower costs and/or higher revenues), coal power is, and will continue to be, inherently risky business.
Carbon Tracker reports: "The trend is more widespread in liberalized markets, such as those in Western Europe, as wind and solar, with their near-zero marginal costs, drive power prices below the operating cost of coal generation. For example, based on a recent Carbon Tracker report, 79% of operating hard coal and lignite capacity in the EU28 is uneconomic. This dire situation contrasts with coal generators in South Korea, where all operators are cash-flow positive due to market structures that effectively guarantee a rate of return regardless of cost.[ii] Irrespective of whether plants are in liberalized or regulated markets, low-cost wind and solar is a megatrend coursing through regions at varying levels. As detailed in Figure 2, this trend has accelerated in 2019, to the extent where we now believe over 50% of global coal capacity has a higher marginal cost than the levelised cost of either solar PV, onshore wind, or offshore wind. Even nations such as Japan, which is known to have limited renewable resources due to topographical and land-use constraints, low-cost wind and solar could soon eclipse the economics of incumbent coal as early as 2024."
