UK power plants just went five days without burning any coal

UK power plants have just gone over five days without burning any coal, their longest coal-free streak since the Industrial Revolution, Bloomberg reports. The five-day period, which began on May 1st, beats the 90-hour record that was set earlier this year. The UK intends to phase out coal power completely by 2025.

This new record comes just over two years after the UK achieved the milestone of going one day without coal. However, the makeup of the country’s energy sources has changed significantly in that time. The biggest increase has come from wind power, which is up to as much as 27 percent from 12.2 percent, but the proportion of nuclear power also increased from 21.2 percent to 24 percent. Meanwhile, the proportion of the country’s energy from natural gas decreased from just over 50 percent to 25 percent.

While this a step in the right direction for the UK’s climate emissions, the country’s domestic power consumption isn’t the whole story. With a relatively small manufacturing sector, the UK’s contribution toward greenhouse gas emissions is far higher when you count so-called “consumption emissions,” which include the emissions created in the manufacturing and transportation of the UK’s imports.

Still, the UK’s transition away from coal is in a far better state than in the US, where President Trump declared that his administration was “putting an end to the war on coal” back in 2017 as he signed an executive order to roll back Obama-era environmental protections.