Good morning. This week the UK passed two historic landmarks in our green energy transition: the end of coal-fired electricity, and the shutdown of the last blast furnace at Port Talbot steelworks. For the country that pioneered the Industrial Revolution, where a million workers were employed in coal mining 100 years ago, the closure of the power station at Ratcliffe-on-Soar, with its vast cooling towers, marked the end of an era.
With the phase-out of coal signalled by the government a decade ago, the closure of this last coal-fired plant was carefully managed, in cooperation with trade unions – allowing many workers to be redeployed, retrained or made voluntarily redundant. In Port Talbot, south Wales, by contrast, the longstanding lack of government strategy on the future for steel has meant that despite a £500m injection of taxpayer cash, 2,500 jobs are set to go, in a local economy . The (albeit slow) move away from fossil fuels has been a long time coming, but as the Labour government pushes hard on a green transition, the Conservatives have gone the other way.
As they scrap through a leadership race, the opposition’s line on green policies has hardened, with many senior Conservatives opting to criticise energy secretary Ed Miliband’s pledge to end new oil and gas licences in the North Sea and . For today’s newsletter, I spoke to , head of the green transition programme at the New Economics Foundation (NEF), about the hopes and the challenges of rebuilding the .
