Brexellent! UK Burns No Coal for First Time Since 1882

I'm going to declare my bias upfront: I am very, very mad at my homeland right now. But international politics and market turmoil aside, it's not all bad news coming from the British isles. And who better than Robert Llewellyn to deliver a little dose of sunshine:

It turns out that recently, for a brief period of time, and for the first time since 1882, Britain burned absolutely no coal for electricity. That's a pretty important milestone. True, as Robert says, it was in the middle of the night. And true, it was only for a few hours. But it still marks an important turning point—and it's one more sign of Death by Capacity Factor that's making fossil fuel generation more expensive. As coal plants sit idle, the cost to run them when they are fired up again goes up. And that makes the economic case for renewables, efficiency, conservation and storage just that little but more compelling.

Still, the UK is well behind other nations, as Robert also points out. Portugal ran on 100% renewables for over four days recently. Let's just hope the wheels don't come off all this progress now that Brits have taken a leap into the great unknown...