Could coal shut-down mark new era for energy?

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This is the download of BBC Inside Science, first broadcast on the 3rd of October 2024.

I'm Marnie Chesterton.

Coming up, we speak to the godfather of microplastics.

After two decades of research, what do we know about their harms?

There's also Pygmy Hippo Love, I turn into a navigation lab rat, but let's start by marking a moment.

We're ready to go, lads, we've got shutdown available.

Right, boys, that's the end of coal in the UK for electricity.

That was the UK's last coal-fired power station shutting down.

ending 142 years of coal-generated electricity.

Which has triggered an understandable wave of nostalgia.

These massive cooling towers are a fixture of the landscape and tied to an industry that employed huge numbers over many generations.

But what difference will the closure of the plant at Ratcliffe-on-Sour actually make to our electricity supplies?

After all, renewables, which only 14 years ago produced a mere 7% of our power, currently generate more than half our electricity.

To find out more, I spoke to two experts in energy and renewables, Professor Paul Eakins from University College London and Professor Deborah Greaves from the University of Plymouth.

I asked Paul how significant this moment is.

Well, for a single plant, it's quite significant in the sense that last year it emitted 2.7 million tonnes of carbon dioxide.

That's 1%

of the UK's total carbon dioxide emissions.

And that's 1%, therefore, that won't be emitted going forward.

So that's the immediate practical consequence.

But there's probably an even greater symbolic consequence in that the UK has moved on to the next generation of electricity generation technologies.

And we've shown the rest of the world that it's possible to make that transition, even though we used to be almost totally dependent on coal for our power generation.

Well, Paul, going back to the fossil fuels and the government targets of net zero by 2050, is it possible to reach that while we're still burning fossil fuels?

Can we rely on measures like removal of CO2 from the atmosphere?

Removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through either planting trees or sequestering it in the soil, that's going to be absolutely critical.

All the models for net zero show a very considerable quantity of carbon dioxide removal.

And of course, there are new technologies being developed for that, which are currently very expensive and only operate at a small scale.

But there's a chance that they could be scaled up.

I'm sceptical as to the quantity of carbon dioxide removal that we'll get to by 2050, but we're going to have to do some of it.

Though, as I say, I doubt we'll get to the kind of 10 billion tonnes a year, which is what some of the models say that we're going to need.

Yeah, well, Deborah, I'd like to bring you in at this point.

As we try to transition away from fossil fuels, what other sources are we turning to to get our energy from?

What can we do?

Okay, well, our main sources of renewable energy for the UK at the moment are wind and solar.

What we've seen since 1990 is we've seen our greenhouse gas emissions in the UK being cut by half so we're making good progress but we do have a long way to go as you say so offshore wind is a big focus of development.

As we find new sites to build offshore wind farms, they are further offshore and in deeper water.

So, we actually need new innovation and new technology to develop floating offshore wind solutions.

Other types of offshore renewable energy that we're also looking at are tidal stream and wave energy.

Tidal stream is being developed commercially now, and wave energy has also got great potential, but is one of those new technologies that is still too expensive at the moment.

So there's more research and innovation to be done.

So there are options there, Deborah.

You know, hydro is something that's been used for the longest of times, but some that sound more experimental.

And yet the government wants all of our electricity to be produced by clean power by 2030.

And that's...

That's not that far away.

Is this even feasible, Deborah?

No, it's not very far away at all.

And if we look at our current rate of development for offshore wind, for example, at the moment we've got 14 gigawatts of capacity.

The government target for gigawatts by 2030 has increased over the last few years.

And at the moment, it's at 60 gigawatts.

But really, we need to make sure that we can get to net zero by 2050.

And we've been framing things around a time scale of 2040.

We can see that actually we need to increase the volume of projects and development by about seven times by 2040.

And we need more people.

We need to increase the workforce in the renewable sector by about six times.

Oh, wow.

So not only do we need to scale up the technologies, but we need way more people.

Paul, bringing you in here.

Obviously, we're moving away from oil and gas.

And North Sea oil and gas industry currently says that it employs many tens of thousands of people.

Those people have many of the skills that are needed offshore in the offshore wind industry.

And where they haven't got the specific skills, they are technically saddie people who can acquire those skills.

So this is what's referred to as the

just transition.

We do not want to move into a situation where a whole bunch of people become unemployed.

But luckily, there will be a source of new jobs from the transition that Deborah's just been talking about.

But we do need to get on with making sure that the skill matches are there so that this can proceed in a kind of more or less seamless way.

The employment issue is presumably the big reason behind whenever there's something that's proposed, like, for example, the deep coal mine in Cumbria.

I mean, I think the offer of new jobs to that area was a big reason why that was initially given the go-aheads.

And Paul, I'm mentioning this because your research was used just last month as evidence in the High Court judgment to block that development.

Do you think that that might take the pressure off if there is this obvious route into jobs within the renewable sector?

Well, I don't think I'm absolutely certain that it would, because that was the main thing that generated the local support for that new coal mine, and I can quite understand that.

One of the arguments very much is that there you've got a site that is on the Irish Sea, which is absolutely well fitted for having a wind power hub, and we should definitely have been investing in that instead.

And I very, very much hope that that will in fact happen.

And, Deborah, Paul, as we move to this different form, this different makeup of power generation in the UK, I'm wondering what do these changes mean to all of us?

I think the fact that the last coal power station has just closed shows real leadership actually from the UK.

And it's also difficult when people's way of life is changing.

But I think we need to recognise that for all of us, we're going to have to make changes.

I think the impact of climate change is now extremely evident.

And so the transition away from burning fossil fuels is something that we absolutely have to do.

But we have to try to do that in the safest way and the way that takes account of the effect it has on communities and on people's lives and how we can create the greatest benefit for society.

And Paul, people's bills have just gone up.

Everyone's hunkering down for another expensive winter.

What are these transitions going to do to people's bills?

Well, ultimately, bills will come down.

and in fact, they should be coming down already.

Well, we have an electricity market which operates on the principle of what economists call marginal cost pricing, which means that all of electricity has to pay what the most expensive form of electricity is charging.

For most of the time, that's gas.

And we know that gas prices have gone up, but we're all paying the cost of that gas on our electricity, even though over 50% of our electricity last year was generated by cheaper low-carbon sources.

And the government has a consultation out to reform the electricity market so that that rather counterintuitive kind of result doesn't come about.

And that's an absolute priority to me.

It seems to me that the reforms that need to be made can't wait for 2050.

Consumers need to see that renewables are now cheaper than fossil fuel electricity.

And I don't think they believe it because they're not seeing it in their bills because the market is not structured in a way that will let that come through.

And as I say, that's simply got to change.

Thank you, Paul Eakins, Professor of Resources and Environmental Policy at University College London and Deborah Greaves, Professor of Ocean Engineering at the University of Plymouth.

The UK has a CCTV camera for every 13 citizens.

So you'd think that for scientists who study how we move through buildings and walkways or how we navigate space, there'd be a wealth of data to work with.

But it lacks precision.

You don't know how people feel or why they turn left or right on a station concourse, and you can't run that like a proper experiment, changing one factor at a time, like the lighting or temperature.

But University College London's new lab aims to change that, and I volunteered to help out.

This is a district line train to upminster.

I've come to almost the end of the London Underground line in East London, to a trendy rust-coloured building on an industrial estate to take part in a science experiment.

Okay, so you're going to be in participant number 108.

I'm Professor Hugo Spears.

I'm Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London.

And where are we?

So we're currently in UCL Pearl, which is a large laboratory.

It's part of University of College London that can study people and the interaction in the environment.

It's got 4,000 square metres of modifiable space and we're in a subsection of it where we've created an entire art gallery of 12 rooms and 12 exhibits and above us if we look up we can see 12 cameras tracking every single bit of the space and that allows us to understand how people move in design spaces.

Hello everybody, this is the instruction for the first part of today's showcase experiment and just do what you would do if you were in a gallery space.

So one by one, over a hundred of us are filtering in to this space.

Black curtains all around me but this is supposed to be a mock-up of a gallery and every one of us has

a baseball cap on our head with a little flat board like a mortar board on the top and it's got a QR code on it.

But for now, I just need to forget all of that and pretend like this is a gallery.

I don't know if this is art.

So 120 people spend 15 minutes wandering around a maze-like space looking at 12 different screens of video art.

Then, over the talloy, Professor Spears sets us off on a task.

Hello, everybody.

Open up your envelopes and navigate from screen to screen and numbers under the sheets.

Okay.

So we all were carrying our own little white envelope and it says task one, open when instructed.

And Professor Spears has just instructed us.

So no more aimless looking at the art.

This is science time.

When I was wandering through this art gallery space, all of the screens seemed to have a number attached to them.

And now I've been given the task of visiting them in a particular order.

Okay, I found number one.

Now I need to go and find number ten.

So everyone's now walking with purpose.

You looking for aid?

Yes,

eight's up that way.

Other side of the wall.

We are good lab rats.

This is a test emergency evacuation.

Please leave now and await further instructions.

So Hugo, I put on a baseball cap with a QR code and wandered around looking for numbers of exhibits in your art gallery.

What on earth was I doing?

Well the QR coded cap allowed us to track your head so we could see where you were and what direction you were looking in precisely.

So we were interested in how well you could navigate and we can learn something from the ways in which you, the choices you made when you went around this space.

I'm Brett Little, I lead the People Movement Team at ARIP.

Brett, how is this useful to you?

Well it gives us another level of understanding.

A lot of the information we base design on is based on research carried out many years ago.

In those days you know we were looking at purely at capacity-based environments like railway stations.

Now we look at cultural venues, cultural institutions, and we're looking at how people experience space and how they enjoy space and also looking at different types of people within that space.

So Hugo, Brett just mentioned different types of individuals moving through a space.

How do you track that here?

The key thing we've done here is not super clever, it's to ask people about their demographics, you know, what's their age, gender, background.

But we also asked them, as Brett was saying, about their experience, how they felt.

Did they feel stressed?

And so that's an important part of this.

We've got really detailed information about how people move through a space that we can map back to how they felt.

And that's quite a new change, something from neuroscience to psychology, about mapping large-scale crowds and the feelings people have.

Ultimately, what might you build?

So for example, I'm thinking a hospital.

That's a space that's going to be built by engineers and architects, but it's going to be used by a very different demographic.

That's right.

And it's not just about the way the spaces are designed, but how they're organised as a system, so how people pass through that system and whether they're stress finding what the next part of that system is.

So the experiment that I just took part in, what's going to happen to that data?

The main bit of data we're getting is tracking data.

Where were you?

What direction were you facing and where did you go?

And from that, we can start to piece together.

We can look at things like, can we predict the future?

Can we predict where you will be a minute into the future?

And does it matter what your demographics were?

Does it matter how quickly you move?

So we'll start to understand things about the way in which humans, humans, possibly beyond humans, how mammals move in spaces that we don't have information about.

And we also looked at emergency evacuation.

And for us, that's really important because we want to have valid measurements of evacuation.

So today we'll have understood why was the last person out last?

Why was the first person out first?

Is there anything we can learn from that?

It does sound like there are some very practical applications there, but I have to poke at you on predicting the future.

That sounds, I don't know, sci-fi.

Yeah, it is.

And I think it's really exciting.

If you look at where AI has gone, you know, we're starting to predict future words, we're predicting all sorts of things.

And I think if we go back to hospitals, you want to predict problems.

There's lots of places you want to predict things.

This is a good example where there's a lot we can do for good if it's well organised.

But we do need to work with AI firms and others who are interested in building models that can tell us what's going to happen likely in the future.

My thanks to Hugo Spears and the team at UCL Pearl.

And two weeks on from the experiment, the team is already analysing the data and discovering how many people don't follow instructions.

If you want to look at what I did, I bumped into BBC Click in the maze, and there's a link to their video on the Inside Science website.

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You're listening to Inside Science with me, Marnie Chesterton.

It's 20 years since we first heard the term microplastics.

These are tiny bits of plastic from less than 5 millimeters in length to as small as can be measured, which are seemingly everywhere scientists look, including inside ourselves.

Inside Science thought it was a good time to find out what we've learnt over the decades.

So I called up marine biologist Richard Thompson, also dubbed the godfather of microplastics, because he published the first paper back in 2004.

But his journey began 10 years before that.

I guess it goes back nearly 30 years, actually.

I had experiments set out on the shoreline and every day I'd got litter arriving from the ocean and I removed it and the next day there was more.

So I started to work with some of the other students and get them involved in beach cleans.

Because I guess I was training to be a scientist I got really curious in the data and then there came this kind of light bulb moment that I realized that the most abundant types of plastic on the shore were not being removed, they weren't even being recorded.

They were the very small bits in essence, bits less than the diameter of a human hair.

And that led on to almost a decade of research before we published the first paper using the term microplastics.

So, that paper 20 years ago, what did it show?

We showed that these very small pieces were present in beaches all around the UK.

We showed that a wide range of creatures could actually, marine creatures, would eat this plastic and doesn't prove harm, but it was of interest to us.

Okay, so your paper from 20 years ago marked the beginning of a new field of research.

20 years on, it seems that microplastics are everywhere.

I mean not just marine life.

Where can we find them?

How ubiquitous are they?

We find microplastics literally everywhere that we've looked.

There are now somewhere around 7,000 publications using the word microplastic.

I mean from my own group we found them right from the deep sea through to near the summit of Mount Everest.

We've found them literally from the poles to the equator and we found them in a wide range of organisms.

I think over 1300.

So they're really all pervasive and of course that includes us.

Microplastics are in the water we drink, the food we eat and the air we breathe.

And do we know where they're coming from?

One of the original sources that got me interested was this idea of the breakdown of larger items, you know, the crisp packets, the bottles that in the environment will break down into smaller and smaller pieces, eventually micro and potentially even nano.

On top of that, there's a whole range of what we call intentionally added microplastics.

So the microbeads from cosmetics.

And then we've also got the particles that are generated by wear of a product while it's in use.

So that could be tires as you drive along the road and then the fibres released from everyday textiles, the clothing we're wearing, the carpet I'm walking on.

And that comes while we're washing clothing, but it also comes while we're walking around on a day-to-day basis.

Okay.

Let's talk about what we know about the harms that they cause because there are bits of research that seem to come out every couple of weeks really.

They clarify that microplastics have been found in different parts of the body.

So we can assume that all of us have bits of microplastic in us, right?

I think that's a reasonable assumption.

I mean, you know, as I say, they're in the food we eat, the air we breathe and the water we drink.

But I think there's limited actual evidence into the harms caused by microplastics.

I mean there was a paper earlier this year that looked at microplastics in arterial plaques.

Can you tell me about that one?

So, that, and it's no criticism of the study, but it was an associational study where they were looking at the incidence of disease and the presence of the plastic.

And my point is, it's not clear that one causes the other.

You've got two things that are elevated in some individuals, but it doesn't prove a cause and effect.

We know quite a lot about harm that's that's originating in laboratory studies from test animals that can result in a range of different effects.

Where I would say we know less is about the effects on humans and that's because it's not possible obviously for us to do a lab experiment on a human.

What I would say however is that although as a scientist that wants to ask those questions and answer them, how much more evidence do we need to define the problem.

We've got, you know, 170 plus nations now agreed to work towards a global treaty on plastics.

Is that then a consensus that what we really need to do is to move the science towards the solutions?

Over time, of course, I'd still like to gather that human health evidence.

But what I wouldn't want to happen is a lack of evidence about human health effects to delay us from taking what I would see as the necessary action based on all the evidence we've got about the environmental harm.

Richard, I'm wondering, can we go 20 years on to 2044?

Can you tell me what you think the state of microplastics will be?

Well I would say microplastics are just one element of it.

There's plastics of all sizes that we need to address the microplastics are part of it.

I'm optimistic that we get a strong and legally binding global plastics treaty that will move us towards reducing the amount of plastic, particularly the unnecessary plastic, that we produce in the first place.

And for the plastics that we do produce, we ensure they're safer and more sustainable.

I'd actually hope that a lot of this responsibility is lifted from the consumer.

40% of all the plastic we produce is packaging.

We need the brand owners and the major retailers to step up and make sure that we're using the minimum amount of packaging necessary and that the packaging that is used is as safe and sustainable as possible.

And that includes making it as compatible as possible with locally available recycling so that recyclable as a label isn't just a theory, it's something that really happens in practice.

Thanks to Richard Thompson at Plymouth's Marine Institute.

And finally, most people are suckers for a cute animal picture, which is probably why cat content makes up a large fraction of the internet.

The Inside Science team couldn't help but notice the fuss around the latest animal online celebrity.

So we asked zoologist and author Jules Howard to delve into the biological forces behind the mania.

Here's a recipe for making an internet animal sensation.

One, take an animal with a cute expression.

Two, add a vivacious personality and lots of videos.

Three, allow to simmer across social media for give or take a couple of months.

That's the story of Mu Deng, a pygmy hippo born two months ago at Thailand's Kao Kio Open Zoo, who is fast becoming a viral megastar.

Mu Deng's hapless, adorable groin pains have been streamed to millions via social media, where videos show her bathing, play biting, and generally causing mischief.

From the sidelines, I find it interesting watching internet animals like these, many of whom accrue millions of followers and plenty of royalties along the way.

But Mu Deng is different.

She's not a pet for starters.

She's a captive representative of a mammal lineage right on the edge of survival.

Just 2,500 or so pygmy hippos survive today in the jungles and swamps of West Africa.

She's an endangered species who, right now, conservationists are working hard to protect from threats including habitat loss and poaching.

Not that you'd hear this side of the story on many of the Mu Deng social media posts, cakes or merchandise, which is, I think, a shame.

Why are we so in love with Mu Deng?

What's her secret?

Mudeng's cuteness is surely part of the reason for her success.

It's long been hypothesized among evolutionary biologists that some facial features of human infants, think big head, big eyes, protruding cheeks, may have evolved to evoke psychological and neurological responses that encourage caregiving in human adults.

According to this argument, the intimate adoration Mudeng receives is partly because she happens to have tripped a hardwired predisposition for bulbous heads and large eyes.

But is there any evidence to support this claim?

The I'm cute, care for me, hypothesis, termed the kinshin shima, which means child scheme, has some evidence to support it.

Choice experiments involving adults selecting between photos of human infants that each vary in their facial features suggest a bias towards cute faces does in fact exist.

But cuteness isn't everything because many internet animal celebrities are not cute.

In fact, they're ugly.

Many have overbites, bad teeth or grumpy tempers.

But Mu Deng ticks this box too.

For every video of her doing something cute, like sleeping with her legs in the air, there's a video of her raging against her handlers, play biting, running away, seemingly screaming in despair.

And so, the strange magic of Mu Deng, different to other animal internet stars, is that she is two things at once, cute and cantankerous, a celebrity and a zoo exhibit.

An internet meme, but also a juvenile mammal going through the motions of development, a member of a species on the brink of extinction.

In the next few weeks and months, whether she likes it or not, Mu Deng will continue to cement her place in internet history.

But we mustn't forget that every every social media share offers us a chance to shine a spotlight on the endangered species that she is a part of.

Then, when her star finally starts to fade, as it does for all celebrities, her existence won't have been for nothing.

It might really have meant something for the future of animals on our planet.

Mu Deng's story is still being written.

We can all play a part in shaping its ending.

Thank you, Gilles Howard, and Moo Deng, which translates from Thai as bouncy pig.

You've been listening to BBC Inside Science with me, Marnie Chesterton.

The producers were Sophie Ormiston, Ella Hubber, and Gerry Holt.

Technical production was by Emily Preston.

The show was made in Cardiff by BBC Wales and West in partnership with the Open University.