In the UK, when I was a kid some (for the time) hard economic right politicians had power and the coal mines were Union bastions since almost the beginning of unions, so the politicians destroyed the coal industry.

Some people are understandably still very angry about this today - after all it destroyed their communities. But an unintended consequence is that it was far easier to disentangle the country from coal power. If you're importing it anyway having closed your own mines, there are fewer angry hard working people to protest when you stop.

So the UK now often (as in most of the day, and sometimes for days at a time) has no coal electricity generation.

The other thing they did was take a very big coal power plant and convert it to burn trees. Notionally it burns "waste" wood but in practice the volumes involved mean people are growing trees to sell as "waste" for that plant. This is not great for the environment, but hey at least it isn't coal.

Depending on how the trees are grown it might even be okish fir the environment. At least the fuel itself is CO2 neutral. Loosing the land on the other hand is a different story.

It's mostly imported. Last time I ran the numbers I calculated that Drax would burn every tree in the UK within a year if limited to local wood. Supposedly it's sawmill waste: https://www.drax.com/sustainability/environment/#sourcing-su... that would otherwise be burned as waste: https://www.drax.com/sustainability/one-company-helped-trans...

Not everyone agrees: https://www.redpepper.org.uk/activists-are-taking-on-the-uks...

Had to smile as apparently now one has to mention UK separately.