UK moves up deadline to end coal-fired power generation to 2024

The U.K. Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy on June 30 announced that the U.K. government will move up the deadline to remove unabated coal from the country’s energy mix by one year, to Oct. 1, 2024. The move supports the U.K.’s plans to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2050. Legislation to implement the new deadline is expected to be introduced soon.

A public consultation on the government’s plans to move up the deadline to phase out unabated coal generation was open from Dec. 14, 2020 through Feb. 26, 2021. In the consultation, the government proposed that coal-fired facilities and power generation units that had converted to biomass would be unimpacted by the proposal. Regarding biomass co-firing, the BEIS proposed to introduce a methodology for the calculation of the net life/cycle of CO2 emissions and designate an enforcement authority with powers to request emissions data on an ad hoc basis.

Information published by the BEIS on June 30 specifies that any coal plant complying with the emission intensity limit by burning biomass will need to calculate CO2 emissions on a net basis, in that emissions from other fuels co-fired with solid fossil fuel are to be included in the calculations for emissions intensity. The emissions related to the biomass component should be calculated taking into account the whole life cycle of the fuel, the BEIS said.

Additional information is available on the BEIS website.