At midnight last night Britain passed a milestone: it was two months since a coal plant anywhere in the country fed any electricity into the national grid. You have to go back to the 1880s for the last time this occurred – to 1882, to be precise, when a single coal-fired power station was opened in Holborn to feed the street lights. Unsurprisingly, the moment has caught the imagination of the green lobby which have hailed it as a triumph for renewable energy.
Maybe not so fast. Few will mourn the passing of coal, which is the dirtiest form of electricity generation and which might have passed into history before now, had we been more enthusiastic about developing a shale gas industry. But the coal hard reality is that we are still a long, long way away from ending our dependence on fossil fuels.
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