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| As the UK closed its last coal-fired power station this week, it sparked a question: what do we do with the mass of defunct, or soon-to-be-defunct, fossil fuel infrastructure that dots the globe? Our reporter Michael Marshall found one answer at another former UK coal site – turn it into a giant battery. Also in this edition: the wild cousins of celebrity pygmy hippo Moo Deng. | |
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THE BIG PICTURE | A journey through a hurricane |  | A rare pilot's view from inside the eye of a hurricane. Credit: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration | The view from a plane in the middle of a hurricane is formidable: an immense wall of cloud sloping upwards and outwards on all sides. "We call it a 'stadium effect' as it almost looks like you're at Wembley or a football game in the United States," says Jason Dunion, a meteorologist at the University of Miami. "You feel very tiny." Follow a hurricane's journey, from a storm's birth to death, in this immersive story. | |
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CLIMATE CONVERSATION | The end of the UK's coal era |
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|  | A view of the Ferrybridge C power plant before it was demolished to make way for a battery site. Credit: Getty Images |
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| | Here is a small, but significant milestone: as of today, the UK no longer generates any of its electricity from coal. The country's last coal-fired power station, Ratcliffe-on-Soar, has been closed down for good. It marks the end of Britain's long relationship with coal, which it has relied upon for providing energy since the Industrial Revolution.
In many countries, there are a great many former fossil fuel power stations that are now defunct. What is happening to them?
To find out, I spoke to Heather Donald from SSE, a UK energy company. They are in the process of converting an old coal-fired power plant, at Ferrybridge in West Yorkshire, UK, into a battery energy storage system (BESS).
The site is now home to an array of huge batteries, each the size of a shipping container. When it comes online next year, excess electricity from renewables like solar panels and wind turbines will be stored in the batteries – ready to be released at times of high electricity demand. |
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 | These batteries can store clean power, and have an easy connection to the grid thanks to the site's legacy. Credit: SSE | BESSs are being erected all over the world. They are crucial to managing the electricity supply, now that we are relying more and more on intermittent sources like solar. And they are often being sited on old power plants. It's a thrifty choice, because these sites already have connections to the electrical grid. When I looked into how these coal-to-battery transitions are playing out around the world, three other examples stood out to me, including one in Nevada that is already operational. | Charging up | For me, this illustrates how quickly things can change, in this case for the better. When I started as a journalist in the late 2000s, the main story around climate change was hopeless government inaction and international paralysis. Climate deniers were influential in many governments, and were fixtures on news coverage of climate change. In my first newsroom, we talked seriously about calamitous temperature rises of 4C or even 6C by 2100.
I don't want to claim that everything is fixed: it's not, not even close. We are on course to warm more than 1.5C, and the evidence has mounted that even small rises pose considerable dangers.
But at the same time, we are making progress on multiple fronts. The fact is that the UK's last coal-fired power station is closing, and people here will only find out through the news: there is no reason to expect any disruption to the electricity supply. The renewable transition is underway. But to hit our targets it needs to go faster: in my story I quote a National Grid report that estimates the UK's BESS capacity needs to increase by a factor of at least six by 2050 to achieve net-zero. That's a lot of batteries.
You can read the full story here. | |
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CLIMATE QUIZ | The clouds that planes leave behind them, crisscrossing the sky, act as a warming blanket. How much could a plane reduce its emissions if it minimised these trails? | A. 30% | B. 40% | C. 50% | Scroll to the bottom of this newsletter for the answer. |
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| What's it like losing your home to the sea? | Experts predict that millions of people will have to migrate by 2050 because of rising sea levels. | Listen here >
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| The unstoppable march of mosquitoes across the US | West Nile virus, Eastern equine encephalitis, malaria and dengue are gaining new ground in the United States. | Keep reading >
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| The logger who learned the value of living trees | Roberto Brito learned how to use a chainsaw at the age of 11. Now he no longer cuts down the Amazon's trees. | Keep reading >
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NUMBER OF THE WEEK | 50% | One early study calculated that climate change caused Hurricane Helene to release 50% more rainfall in some areas of the US than it otherwise would have. BBC Weather's Tomasz Schafernaker explains what made Hurricane Helene so damaging. | |
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TAKE A MOMENT | Rivers of ice | Datshiane Navanayagam talks to two women dedicating their lives to the study of glaciers. | |
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