Hello and welcome to the Green Alliance News Review, hosted by Matt Williams and Amy Mount.

Green Alliance is the charity and think tank that is all about achieving ambitious leadership for the environment.

And with this podcast, every two weeks or so, we'll bring you the latest insights on environmental policy and politics,

both in the UK and abroad. Please keep your comments coming. You can find us on Facebook and Twitter

at Green Alliance UK. In this episode, we'll be investigating the green surge in the European

parliamentary elections and looking ahead to another really significant election,

but one with a much smaller electorate. That's the race to become the next Conservative Party

leader and the next Prime Minister following Theresa May's announcement that she plans to step

down on Friday the 7th June. But first, as of 4pm today on Tuesday the 4th of June,

as we're recording, the UK has not burned coal for electricity for 432 hours.

That's 18 days. What's going on there, Matt?

Yeah, so while some people are trying to keep count of the number of contenders in the Conservative leadership contest,

other people are keeping count of the hours that we've gone

coal-free. And as you say, we've broken the previous record, which was only set earlier this

year. And it's not the first time in the past few years that we've broken the record for the

longest period that we've gone without coal power contributing to the electricity grid

since the Industrial Revolution. And in the past couple of weeks, there's been a significant contribution from wind power,

which on average has contributed 13% of our electricity.

And on the 14th of May, which must have been a particularly sunny day,

solar was contributing 25% of our electricity.

And when you say that's the first time since the Industrial Revolution,

how far back are we looking? I did a little bit of research to put this in context and really

...