Coal mining created community and culture. Can clean energy do the same?

The age of coal may be drawing to a close – and not before time, most would agree.

In April, the US Environmental Protection Agency announced that coal-fired power plants will be required to either capture nearly all of their climate-warming emissions or shut down by 2039. In the same month, a deal agreed by the G7 group of nations set a deadline of 2035 for the phase-out of unabated coal-power plants.

The UK is already ahead of the curve: coal phase-out was first announced in 2015. The last deep coal mine in the country, at Kellingley in North Yorkshire, closed that year. The last open-cast pit, at Merthyr Tydfil in South Wales, was shut down in 2023. And later this year, the last coal-fired power station in the country, Ratcliffe-on-Soar in Nottinghamshire, will close. At that point, the slow death of British coal will be complete.

Coal is by a distance the most harmful form of energy generation in terms of both greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution; it's also extremely dangerous to extract, and the process causes catastrophic damage to natural landscapes. Good riddance, then?

Up to a point. The human relationship with coal has always been more complicated than that.

In northern England, where I live and grew up, coal mining has long been entwined with culture and communities: bringing towns and generations together, cultivating pride in industry, and inspiring decades of music, song, films, stories and art. The brass band that I used to play in when I was a kid wouldn't have existed without the coalfields and collieries. My town wasn't a mining village, but no-one who grew up in coal country could be completely untouched by the industry. It's the same in many other regions of the UK, and indeed around the world.

As coal mining becomes history, few will miss the dirt, the pollution, the industrial disease, the intolerable danger. But there are things – things to do with identity, endeavour, pride, mutual support – that may be worth holding on to.

As we move into a new age of energy generation, one built not on fossil fuels, but on solar, wind and hydropower, on nuclear and bioenergy, what should we throw away, and what might we try to keep? Are there elements of coal mining heritage that can be not only be retained but repurposed, to help develop and drive the new energy revolution?

It can be hard for outsiders to understand the profound and complicated relationship that has long existed between mining communities and the back-breaking work of coalmining; between the miner and the coalface.      

"Mining is a really, really tough job," the Yorkshire folk-singer Kate Rusby said in a 2018 interview. "They were tough men. And they were proud of it, proud of every minute of it. It ruined people, it broke people. And one of those people was my grandad."

Rusby wrote the song My Young Man about her grandad, a coal miner who died in middle-age from emphysema, and her grandmother, Ivy, who nursed him through the years of illness. The song is written from Ivy's point of view, and presents a heartbreaking picture of what the pit could do to the men who worked it – worked it, and were killed by it, and nevertheless felt nothing but pride for what it represented.

My young man wears a coat,

Once, long ago, a bonny coat

Which my young man wore with pride.

Now I dress the coat all on his back,

For love for him I will not lack,

But to see it now, that collier's coat, I can't abide.

Pride in a hard, dangerous life also came through in the memories of the great Welsh actor Richard Burton, whose father and brothers were miners. He once spoke of his father's love of the pit and the coal seam: "He used to talk about it [in the way] some men will talk about women, about the beauty of this coal face." Miners, Burton said, considered themselves "the aristocrats of the working class".

Not all miners saw the coalface itself quite so romantically; it was the bond with their fellow workers that mattered. In 2005, the historian Brian Elliott compiled a collection of interviews with Yorkshire miners whose work in the coalfields of northern England dated back, in some cases, to before World War One. Not many speak of the coalface as if it were a woman; the pit, on the contrary, is typically spoken of in blunt terms, as an adversary, or simply a hard fact of life. Two things come up again and again: on one hand, the danger and hardship – bones broken, bodies crushed, skin torn away, lungs ruined by dust, men killed by falls or gas or explosions – and, on the other, the profound and lasting comradeship.

"What makes the pit is the men," says one of Elliot's interviewees, Dougie Pond, who worked for 47 years in the coal mines of South Yorkshire and later turned to poetry to explore the mining life. In one of his poems, he addresses a question many former miners have been asked (and must have asked themselves): if you were given another chance, would you go down the pit again? The answer: "I'll say 'no I wouldn't' when I think of dust, sweat and toil/Or 'yes, I would' when it's the men I'm thinkin' about."

Other miners in Elliot's research echoed this view. "As much as you can say the job was crap, there was always that camaraderie with the blokes," says Dennis Rogers, born in 1927. "It would have been terrible but for that friendship with my mates," says Terry Carter. "Life down the pit was not fit for humans," says Peter Finnegan. "[But] you cannot beat the miners. They would share their last crust of bread."

In The Man Beneath, Len Doherty's 1957 novel of pit life in northern England, a miners' union leader gives his take on the relationship between the hard life of the miner and the enduring sense of community among mining families.

"It's because we can suffer, and do suffer sometimes," he says, "that we're a great crowd of people."

Smokestack nostalgia?

It's clear that there’s something rich here, something meaningful; it's clear that the cultural and emotional heritage of coal runs deep, and that these decades or centuries of lived industrial experience shouldn't be lightly disposed of or carelessly forgotten. But we should also tread with care.

In a 2015 essay for the philosophy magazine Aeon, Deborah Rudacille explored the phenomenon of "smokestack nostalgia" in the post-industrial US: the "yearning" for "a vanishing industrial United States" among working-class communities that "lament the shuttering of blast furnaces, coke ovens, mines and factories" while at the same time knowing full well the toll taken by these industries on local wellbeing.

"You're risking your life and definitely risking your health to take care of your family," said Shane Simmons, a former mine worker Rudacille met in the Virginia coalfields. "But there was such a strong sense of community and family there. I think it's why people cling on so much. You know all your neighbours… there is so much attachment."

It's an understandable sentiment – but this kind of "smokestack nostalgia" can also leave communities vulnerable to manipulation. In West Virginia, for example, coal mining companies funnelled funding into a supposedly "grassroots" organisation called "Friends of Coal", aimed at reconstructing the bond between coal and local communities and re-establishing coal mining as a central pillar of the state's identity. This was in fact at odds with a decline in the economic importance of the industry in the region, but that didn't stop the group recruiting local celebrities – football coaches, military officers, a Nascar driver, a professional fisherman – to push the "Friends of Coal" message: "Coal is West Virginia!"

The episode, argue the authors of a 2010 paper on the "Friends of Coal" project, illustrated "how industry works to maintain community loyalty when it no longer serves as a major source of employment".

'Not again, not ever again'

Other industrial communities have resisted appeals to nostalgia, however.

In 2013, a local woman was handed a leaflet about a proposed new opencast coal mine in south Wales, near the former mining communities of Rhymney and Merthyr Tydfil. "Not again, not ever again," she replied. These words became a rallying cry for the United Valleys Action Group, an alliance of local residents who opposed the mine.

"The mindset that is still here ingrained in the people of the Valleys [is] of King Coal being the saviour of the Valleys – very blinkered and rose-tinted memories of what coal brought to the Valleys," one UVAG campaigner told researchers who visited the area in 2017. "Although it put food on the table, how many old miners do you see sitting around? You know, it killed. People didn't get to enjoy their retirement out of that. They gave their lives for the industry and for, okay, a living wage, but we would say [they were] exploited."

Rhymney is a town best-known for the coalmining lament Bells of Rhymney, adapted by Pete Seeger from a poem by the Welsh writer (and miner) Idris Davies:

'Oh what will you give me?'

Say the sad bells of Rhymney.

"Is there hope for the future?'

Cry the brown bells of Merthyr.

"I've seen the mountain black; I've seen how lovely it is now," said a local woman interviewed by the researchers. "So why not start now. Let's think about other methods of energy that won't wreck areas and cause damage to the populations living nearby. Think about people for a change."

UVAG had its way. The plans for a new mine were finally rejected in 2018. The nearby Ffos-y-Fran mine closed in 2023.

The region may soon get a first-hand look at the new face of energy generation, as a major Rhymney employer, the medical technology firm Convatec, has announced plans for what it calls a "renewables hub" to power its manufacturing plants. With three 150m (490ft) wind turbines and around 10 hectares (24 acres) of solar panels, the project could generate up to 20MW of power, equivalent to the power required to supply around 5,000 homes with electricity.

However, that's a relatively small-scale operation. (By comparison, a typical coal power plant generates about 600MW.) To see whether renewables can really replicate the sense of community, identity and pride that we've seen in coal and other heavy industries, we may need to look elsewhere.

Wind powered

How about wind farms, for instance? Off the east coast of England, around 40km (25 miles) out in the inhospitable North Sea, turn the turbines of East Anglia One. The multi-billion-pound installation features more than 100 turbines, each around 120m (390ft) in height, but work is already underway on what will become the East Anglia Array, a hub of connected windfarms that, when complete, could generate up to 3.1GW.

"United By Wind", a short PR film produced by the Spanish energy firm Iberdrola, introduces the workforce that is making the East Anglia Array a reality. Intriguingly, it focuses more on the people than the technology. We're shown intercut footage of the coastal countryside, of offshore workers training for work in perilous high seas, of sweeping turbine blades, and of men and women in hard hats and high-viz jackets, moving purposefully among hot metal and heavy machinery. The aim of the film – a PR production, remember – is to cement the link between industry and people ("What makes a project like this real is the enormous human effort," says Jonathan Cole, managing director of Offshore Wind Energy at ScottishPower Renewables).

Renewables, of course, don't require anything like the manpower of an extractive industry like coal. Once a turbine has been built, transported, erected and connected, most of the hard work has been done – the majority of the jobs generated by a big renewables project are in these first phases. These are multinational work projects; the turning turbines stay, but by and large the workforce moves on.

Community energy projects

At the other end of the scale to the East Anglia Array are the initiatives that foster a different kind of relationship between society and energy: so-called Community Energy (CE) projects. In CE, local people call the shots and share the benefits of local energy production that's tailored to meet the demands of their community. CE could be a key part of the drive towards net zero: "In a context of climate emergency requiring rapid and extensive climate mitigation," the academic Patrick Devine-Wright warned in the journal Nature Energy in 2019, "overlooking the contribution of grassroots, CE initiatives looks increasingly unwise."

In the US, the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (IRA) explicitly linked the development of new, local energy with the industrial communities of the coalfields by granting tax breaks to renewables projects in areas – "energy communities" – that were formerly reliant on coal. However, the broad definition of an "energy community" under the IRA may mean that windfarms or solar installations end up some distance from the ex-coal towns they're supposed to serve – the energy may be clean, but the sense of grassroots endeavour may be forfeited.

The age of renewable energy won't look the same as the extractive energy industry of old, because it isn't geographically concentrated.

There's real community energy, in every sense, to initiatives like Selce in south-east London, which works to alleviate local energy poverty, help local people improve the energy efficiency of their homes and businesses, and install local-scale solar PV technology. This kind of eco-social activism feels a far cry from a community built around the industry and labour of energy generation, but it nonetheless is beneficial to all those it helps.

Similarly, the independent energy network in place since 2008 on the Scottish island of Eigg – which is owned and operated by the local communities, and combines solar, wind and hydropower to supply the islanders with energy – showcases a sustainable energy future where energy production serves the people, and not the other way around.          

One reason why the coming age of renewable energy won't look the same as the extractive energy industry of old, with its mining villages and factory towns, is that a large proportion of jobs associated with renewable energies aren't geographically concentrated: as the UK pushes towards its net-zero goals, we'll need people working in domestic insulation, providing low-carbon IT and professional services, installing heat pumps and EV charge-points – these are necessary, highly skilled jobs, but it doesn't seem like the kind of work that communities grow up around.

There will, though, still be a geographical component to the low-carbon industrial workforce. A report from the UK Local Governments Association suggests that the traditional industrial heartlands of the UK will still have a part to play: the old workhorse will just have to learn a few new tricks. The English Midlands, known for many years as a centre for vehicle manufacture, has an obvious way forward as the electric vehicle industry continues to grow (there will, the report forecasts, be thousands of jobs in manufacturing low-emission vehicles, battery packs and modules "in gigafactories situated near existing production sites").

And coal country? Much of the work there, ironically, will be in decarbonising existing infrastructure: depending on how the UK's industrial strategy evolves, that may be through the development of hydrogen, bioenergy or carbon capture and storage (CCS). In West Yorkshire, my own home district, great chunks of carbon-heavy industry – including glass manufacturing and agrochemicals – will have to transition to low-carbon solutions; this, the LGA notes, "represents a distinct challenge for the region, but also an opportunity to scale-up low-carbon competences". A little way to the north, the vast Drax power station – once a coal-munching monster, now a biomass facility – will be expected to lead the way in developing clean power technology.

Imagine a pub called The Spinning Turbine or The Engineer's Arms

And in the north-east of England, where at its peak a century ago the coal mining industry employed around 223,000 miners, a post-industrial seaport has been redefined as Energy Central. Blyth, not far north of Newcastle, was once known for shipbuilding as well as for coal; the long Blyth peninsula was the site of two coal-fired power stations and a busy industrial port. The town declined along with most of Britain's heavy industry in the 1980s. Now, under the Energy Central banner, it has a new identity: as a hub for offshore renewables, as a centre of expertise in engineering, and as a resource-rich base for subsea technologies, energy storage, battery manufacture and decommissioning.

Does that sound like the sort of work people used to write songs about in the old days? Well, it might not – but we're going to need new songs. Imagine a pub called The Spinning Turbine or The Engineer's Arms. Try to hear the poetry in Hornsea, Moray, Beatrice, Walney, Triton Knoll, the new industrial cathedrals of the North Sea. Cities once adopted nicknames derived from the industries that defined them: Cottonopolis, Ironopolis, Linenopolis (Manchester, Middlesbrough and Belfast, respectively). It's true that "Renewablopolis" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, but our industries can still play a part in people's identities.

We can't go back, of course – there'll be no exact 21st-Century equivalent of the pit village. Our communities today are shaped differently, and connected in different ways. "Work" doesn't mean what it used to mean. But even though the structures have changed, some of the same spirit may remain. The recollections of a 1970s Yorkshire miner, the work of a local community on a Scottish island, and the blueprints for developing a 21st-Century renewable energy workforce carry the same message: it's about the people. 

-bbc