The UK and Slovakia are new members of an exclusive club: in 2024 they both closed their final coal-fired power stations and joined Austria, Belgium, Sweden, Portugal, Peru and the United Arab Emirates on the growing list of countries which have given up on this particularly dirty form of electricity production.1

For the UK, the birthplace of the industrial revolution and the first G7 country to leave coal behind, it is a particularly iconic milestone. But it almost didn’t happen.