The change is because of sheer economic force and basic technological progress. Coal is becoming relatively more expensive and it's been outmoded by superior technology

Coal production is down for the same reason arithmometer and rotary dial telephone production is down. Nobody needs it.

The economics of overproduction doesn't change the unit cost. Unless the UK wants to heavily subsidize coal at a major loss and force themselves to continue to use antiquated technology to prop up this energy buggy whip, it's done.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_sourc...

Coal isn't becoming meaningfully more expensive. Coal costs ~$30/tonne. It's why it's been so difficult to replace.

Isn't coal used as an ingredient to products, such as stainless steel, too though?

Any steel. It's OK, most of that industry is gone already, partly due to the Thatcherite era, and partly due to the exhaustion of the iron mines that caused it to be built in the first place.

(It's most efficient to do iron refining as close as possible to the iron and coal mines since all the components are so heavy and much of the ore ends up as waste slag)

There is a 110 year roughly-linear downtrend in UK coal production. Recent technical improvements would have had some, but minor, impacts on the UK de-coaling their economy compared to that.

> Unless the UK wants to heavily subsidize coal at a major loss and force themselves to continue to use antiquated technology to prop up this energy buggy whip, it's done.

If the buggy whip drove further & faster than a motor vehicle we'd still be using them. Coal produced more electricity than their new setup does. This is more akin to all the horses being dead so everyone has to move to bicycles. Arguably not a big step back, but not obviously better.

It's trended downward because of the basic economics of the "peak oil" argument - it has become more scarce and thus more expensive to extract.

The "more electricity" point is a red herring. Cost per kwh is all that matters.

That's like pointing to AM radio being around longer saying it produced more hours of audio and then trying to use that as a basis for it being of superior quality. It's just older.

The bicycle argument is also a total misunderstanding of the vast technical superiority of things like modern solar.

The aptera and light-year one automobiles for instance, both due next year, will feature solar panels, that in sunny climates, will charge a vehicle more miles than an average daily commute.

This means that in typical use, the owner will never need to plug in or otherwise fuel up the vehicle, at all.

For a WFHer like myself it means I effectively will always hop in with a "full tank". I'm excited and you should be too.

These are the 1.0 version of the cars. Wait until the 5th or 10th year.

In 2030, a 1,500 or 2,000 mile range vehicle that fueled itself merely by sitting outside is what I'll be driving. You can continue going to the gas station and paying $10-20/gallon if you wish. Have fun.

There's significant revolutions in energy coming in the 2020s. Such as partially transparent photovoltaics that transition window UV exposure with the sunlight so you get a pleasant adaptive window coating that also powers your home.

We're on the road to effectively unmetered energy. We are doimg much better than coal now. Let's keep moving

> In 2030, a 1,500 or 2,000 mile range vehicle that fueled itself merely by sitting outside is what I'll be driving. You can continue going to the gas station and paying $10-20/gallon if you wish. Have fun.

Battery technology seems to anecdotally increase capacity at 10% year on year, at best. The typical electric car has a battery that gets 150-200 miles at the moment. I don't expect to see a 1500-2000 mile range battery in 10 years. Or even 20 years.

You'll also "pay" the same tax/duty per mile as you currently do, when the law changes to include GPS chips in every car to track your mileage, since the government can no longer tax petrol at the pump. The next 10 years might be the golden 'cheap' era for electric cars before governments figure out how to make up the fossil fuel tax shortfall.

The aptera 1,000 mile car is coming out literally next year: https://www.aptera.us/

1500 is totally doable within the decade

The government tax strategy is already being done in many states who give higher annual registration fees for electric cars. It's hurt their adoption but it's not a huge amount

If that comes out, it will be a game changer, but I wonder why other manufacturers aren’t doing the same?

"This is more akin to all the horses being dead"

In this case, the horses are far from dead, but people are unhappy about all the manure that stems from their use.

Accidentally, the problem with manure in city streets was a major motivator for a switch from horse carriages to early cars.

> In this case, the horses are far from dead, but people are unhappy about all the manure that stems from their use.

Very nice analogy. Having major coastal cities underwater or regularly threatened with huge flooding is the 21st century version of manure piling up on the street.

> it's been outmoded by superior technology

I assume you mean natural gas, since renewables are still a small portion of the overall energy mix.

Bear in mind that fracked gas wells decline much faster than conventional ones, and the only reason gas is so cheap is due to fracked wells. It's anybody's guess how long this "superior technology" will last.

Let's also not ignore the fact that coal use has effectively been exported to China as the UK/US increasingly rely on manufacturing abroad. We still share a single atmosphere, and global coal consumption is up 6.2% from 2010, regardless of how much the UK/US have reduced their specific share: https://www.worldometers.info/coal/

If you look at the chart on use you'll see that use for anything other than electricity generation vanished a while ago - in part because there are better alternatives: diesel for trains, natural gas (which the UK has lots of) for domestic heating - with laws to improve air quality prompting this too.

Plus I suspect deepmine coal that the UK has used in the past will be pretty expensive to extract relative to the alternatives.

It's kinda old news at this point, less "what happens" and more "what happened".

why do you think the UK will be worse off without coal?

Their per-capita electricity demand is dropping off quite sharply, and their position relative to Europe is apparently quite low [0]. Those aren't small differences. Either they are giving up their industrial production capabilities or giving up on lifestyle choices.

If I had to chop my electricity use by 10-20% I'd be pretty noticeably worse off. Maybe they've got some really impressive tech to maintain their lifestyles but the Occam's razor here is they're probably just going to be doing without and will likely lose industrial capability or see worse living conditions.

[0] https://www.worlddata.info/europe/united-kingdom/energy-cons...

TV’s, PC’s, and lightbulbs have gotten a lot more efficient over time. A 50 inch LED TV for example uses the same power as a 21 inch CRT. Even just looking back to Plasma TV’s and LED’s use 1/3 the power for the same size TV.

That’s continued with many people using very low power tablets rather than laptops, desktops, or giant TV’s. For portable devices low power means longer battery life and less weight which has been constantly pushing demand lower.

Compared to the 1950s, the biggest cause of changes to domestic electricity use in the UK wouldn’t be TVs and lightbulbs, it would be double glazing, cavity wall insulation, and loft insulation (for electrically heated houses, which certainly isn’t all of them), microwave dinners replacing Sunday roasts (at least, in so far as 50s UK stoves and hobs were electric rather than gas), and showers replacing hot baths.

That said, IIRC the main electricity users in the UK are business rather than domestic, and I don’t know anything about how that’s changed in the last 70 years, only that it has.

> (for electrically heated houses, which certainly isn’t all of them)

Electrically heated houses are a very small minority of UK houses:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/426988/united-kingdom-uk...

Not sure why this is being downvoted. The UK has been intentionally deindustrialising since the 1980s and has essentially lost most of its industrial capability already. What remains is essentially assembly and finishing (i.e. our car manufacturing industry should be more accurately termed as car assembly) This was done first because this was the easiest way for Thatcher to break the unions, and then because it turned out that focussing on services (now 80% of the UK economy and 40-50% of our exports) was more productive anyway for the UK (and locally produced a better environment as we essentially exported our pollution). Of course with Brexit we've reduced our ability to export services to our biggest market and so ironically may actually see a boost to manufacturing as it becomes relatively more profitable, especially since the Tories intend to reduce worker and environmental protections which is why they fought so hard against including none regression clauses in the Brexit deal.

The UK is giving up on its industrial production capabilities. I saw a National Grid document not too long ago talking about how their infrastructure plans involve downscaling the grid capacity up North as it comes up for replacement, including outright removing lines, because it was built to support industrt that no longer exists in the country. In general, there's just not the political will to actually make things here, and the press tends to push the narrative that anyone who thinks we should is stuck in the past.

> In general, there's just not the political will to actually make things here, and the press tends to push the narrative that anyone who thinks we should is stuck in the past.

We make a surprising amount of high-tech stuff, but it tends to be bespoke and expensive or very automated. Mass employment manufacturing is down to a few car plants owned by Nissan and Honda whose future is in doubt over Brexit. This is partly due to terrible industrial relations in the 1970s and 80s.

Financial services doesn't help, it's such a large part of our economy that it tends to suppress other sectors. It's our form of Dutch disease.

Brexit adds to the pressure, we are likely to lose most of our car production over the next decade.

I think even without Brexit we were likely to lose most of our car production over the next decade, but with Brexit I can't see manufacturers retooling plants to build new models in the UK

Electrification does make cars simpler so perhaps there's still some scope for someone

One thing you may or may not be missing is that most heating in the UK is done using gas fired central heating, air conditioning is very rarely used due to the UK's climate (even working from home there might have been 3 weeks in the year I'd have appreciated it).

Little of all - as an example, one of my previous jobs was enhancing control software for a german-made product (no, not that).

Also worth mentioning: the UK has a cool, maritime climate and abundant natural gas, so there's just not much demand for the biggest sink of residential electricity. This is one of the UK's bigger challenges for further decarbonisation: the political consequences of a cold, windless spell, electrical heating, and lots of pensioners would be... interesting.

That's not household usage though, it's total per capita. The UK is primarily a services economy, other European countries have more energy hungry industrial users.