Most of the output of UK COAL goes to power stations, and as a third of our electricity is still generated from coal you can fairly call it coal by wire. You can transform coal into many different products - but quite the most important transformation is from coal to electricity.
No other form of energy can approach electricity's versatility in homes, offices and factories and this vital need for electricity will increase.
Power stations use coal to heat boilers to produce steam which, in turn, is used to drive turbo-generators. In the most modern power stations, all these operations are completely automatic. The coal is pulverised to a powder that can be fed to the boilers pneumatically, as if it were a gas. The boilers are massive - some can convert more than a million pounds of water into steam each hour. Major power stations receive coal on a 24-hour, seven-days-a-week schedule.
Electricity not needed locally is fed into a national grid or 'supergrid' carrying power all over the country through about 13,000 kilometres of high-voltage transmission lines.
With the increasing awareness of the effects to the environment of the burning of coal and other fossil fuels, new technologies and methods of combustion are being researched and developed to make coal a more efficient and cleaner fuel for power generation. UK COAL has proposals to build an Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC), electricity power generation plant sited next to Kellingley Colliery, West Yorkshire. This plant would showcase this new form of clean coal power generation technology and stimulate take-up of this technology to replace existing coal burn capacity and future gas and nuclear generation when these stations reach the end of their natural lives.