Britain plans end to coal power by 2025

By Stanley Reed, New York Times News Service

Wednesday, Nov. 18, 2015 | 6:35 p.m.

LONDON — The British government on Wednesday called for the closing of all coal-fired power plants in the country by 2025, and proposed that use of the plants be restricted two years before that.

The move, announced in advance of the United Nations conference on climate change set to open in Paris on Nov. 30, appeared aimed at showing Britain as a leader in reducing carbon dioxide emissions.

Additionally, the European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, said in a report that the bloc would probably achieve its goal of reducing emissions by 20 percent by 2020, compared with levels that existed in 1990.

The commission also forecast that by 2020, Europe would be able to increase to 20 percent from roughly 12 percent the share of energy it consumes from renewable sources like the sun and wind. But the report cautioned that some countries, including Britain, “need to assess whether their policies and tools are efficient and effective” in raising the use of renewable forms of energy.

Analysts say the proposal to close coal-fired power stations could also put pressure on Britain’s electricity providers and on its electricity grid, which has recently shown signs of strain.

“It cannot be satisfactory for an advanced economy like the U.K. to be relying on polluting, carbon-intensive 50-year-old coal-fired power stations,” Amber Rudd, the minister for energy and climate change, said in a statement.

The government will publish its detailed proposals in the spring, she said. Britain would only close the coal plants if the government believed that a shift to other methods of creating energy could be achieved.

“If we take this step,’’ she said, ‘‘we will be one of the first developed countries to deliver on a commitment to take coal off the system.”

Since becoming Britain’s energy and climate change minister this year, Rudd has shaken up energy policy, cutting back subsidies for renewable forms of energy like wind and solar, arguing that these technologies needed to be more cost-effective.

Coal use in Britain is in decline as utilities close aging plants, but more than 20 percent of the country’s electricity was still being generated from the fuel in the second quarter of this year. By comparison, just over 30 percent of British electricity came from natural gas, 25.3 percent from renewables and 21.5 percent from nuclear plants.

Analysts say that most British coal plants are likely to be shut by the mid-2020s anyway, but they add that forcing the closing of all coal plants within a decade could be too hasty. Earlier, Britain announced plans to build new nuclear plants, but the first is not scheduled to begin operating until 2025. Utilities are also no longer investing in natural gas-fired power plants because of their expense.

“This is a lot of posturing ahead of Paris,” said Deepa Venkateswaran, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein in London, referring to the climate conference. “Given that new nuclear is delayed, no one is building new gas,’’ and the urgency to get rid of the rest of Britain’s coal plants “appears premature,” she said.

Utility executives say that coal remains a reliable, flexible source of power at a time when the electric grid is moving toward greater reliance on sources like wind and solar, which at present are much less reliable than coal. The contributions from wind and solar energy still vary with wind speeds and the amount of sunlight available.

In a sign that the British electrical grid is under some strain, electricity prices spiked briefly this month. National Grid, which operates the system, asked electricity generators to provide more power while requesting industrial users to cut back on consumption.

Speaking in London on Wednesday to an organization of civil engineers, Rudd said that Britain should be using natural gas instead of coal to generate electricity because gas burns cleaner than coal. With the decline in production of oil from the North Sea, she added, Britain may need to get 75 percent of its natural gas from other countries by 2030, compared with the roughly half that it now imports.

Britain, she said, should be encouraging the building of gas-fired power plants and the exploitation of shale gas, which has been largely stymied by environmental activists and local opposition. She also said that the coal plants would be closed only when the government was convinced that the country could shift effectively to generating gas.

Dieter Helm, a professor of energy politics at the University of Oxford, said that Rudd was correct to be targeting coal.

“If you are serious about climate change, the first thing to do is get out of coal,” he said in an interview. From this perspective, he said, Britain appears to be more serious about tackling climate change than is Germany.

Germany has invested heavily in wind and solar in recent years, but it still gets about 25 percent of its energy from coal and other solid fuels, according to the European Commission.