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A decade-long retrofit programme in the industrial town of Corbridge offers a detailed record of what happens when a mid-sized manufacturing economy attempts to replace coal-fired power with a mix of wind, solar, and battery storage without an accompanying natural-gas bridge, an approach less common than the gradual, gas-supported transitions favoured elsewhere. Corbridge's municipal utility retired its last coal plant in stages between 2014 and 2020, replacing capacity with a nearby wind farm, rooftop and warehouse-roof solar installations, and a battery storage facility sized to cover roughly six hours of average evening demand. The transition succeeded in cutting the town's electricity-related carbon emissions by seventy-eight percent, a figure utility officials frequently cite as evidence that a full renewable transition is achievable without gas as an intermediate step. However, the programme also exposed a vulnerability that planners had underestimated: during a ten-day stretch of unusually still, overcast weather in early 2019, both wind and solar output fell to a fraction of forecast levels simultaneously, and the battery reserve was exhausted within two days, forcing the utility to purchase emergency power from a neighbouring grid at prices more than four times the normal rate. Following that episode, Corbridge expanded its battery capacity by sixty percent and signed a standing emergency-supply contract with the neighbouring grid operator, measures that have prevented a repeat shortfall in the years since but that also added costs not reflected in the original transition budget. Energy planners studying Corbridge's experience are divided on its broader lesson: some argue it demonstrates that battery storage, if built at sufficient scale, can substitute entirely for a gas bridge, while others contend that Corbridge's success actually depended on its emergency access to a neighbouring grid, a fallback option that would not exist for a more isolated town attempting the same transition.