Irish man here - Over the last few years, we've graduated from providing cheap energy to now importing most of our energy. We've seen huge energy price increases as a result. We're seeing more and more cost-of-living protests, the war now means more will suffer with fuel prices and we're still going ahead with closing down energy suppliers (this is a 2025 article but the point still stands).
To anyone praising these stupid, politically incentivised initiatives - congratulations to us on making the poor and middle-classes poorer.
But it's all good - we're saving the world I guess. The poor folks can sort themselves out.
The actual causes of electricity cost rises in Ireland being higher than Europe are:
Lower population density on a grid without good connections to neighbours.
Previous underinvestment in network infrastructure.
Gas price rises combined with Ireland having less renewables that the EU average (middle of the pack for electricity, 3rd from bottom on total energy).
Maybe saving the world a bit harder would have helped keep prices down. It's certain that building more renewables now is the likeliest path to cheaper electricity.
But it is abundant in Russia, Ukraine, Germany, and Poland. Also, there is nuclear power in France.
However, Russia and Ukraine are at war. Germany is willing to go green and destroy itself. EU hates Poland and other east European countries. And EU and the rest of the world can't disassociate nuclear power with weapons.
So I guess EU can enjoy their limited and expensive green energy.
This. Fossil fuels are not cheap in Ireland, I think we only produce a small quantity of natural gas, everything else is imported. Ireland should be running towards renewables, we have no indigenous fossil fuels industry to lose and every watt we generate from renewables is money that stays in Ireland. We should be focused on reducing nimbyism and building out renewables.
does this renewable policy of wind farms etc also extend to the rain forest being cut down for balsawood? or the landfilles the massive chunks of fiberglass coated wings then get put into?
I guess we need a new planet when we're done filling it with junk and have depleted all the rain forest etc
> Most Europe has way too high electricity prices.
Way to high compared to what? Some countries do not even have a problem with prices but with capacity (Netherlands). They would be willing to pay but they do not have the grid to deliver where the thing is needed, and it's hard to build new grids in high density areas.
> It seems logical that ending the use of existing coal energy infrastructure lead to an increase of prises.
But doesn't this depend a lot on planning and investing in alternatives rather the just closing or not the coal? Sure, if you just close one source and leave everything else untouched prices will increase, but doesn't sound like the smartest approach overall...
If it's due to tax it can't be used to advocate the pros or cons of market arrangements, since we don't know what the market would be doing in the absence of the tax.
> It seems logical that ending the use of existing coal energy infrastructure puts upward pressure on prices
Only if you externalize environmental costs. The point is that coal is actually really expensive. The only real argument is how fast the implicit subsidy on these externalized costs should be removed. The world has had decades to slowly remove these subsidies and failed to do so. The impacts caused by these externalized factors are starting to stack up and so should the prices.
Upfront costs... then running costs (in the UK at least, it has to command a premium over other energy prices, to be profitable)... afterwards costs (in the UK no private company is on the hook for decommissioning their nuclear plants, the population will pick up that cost through taxes)...
But sure, nuclear is cheap if you ignore all those things.
Which to we ignore for coal? Cost to build a new plant? Cost to run? The decommissioning costs? (Yes we ignore the externalities, and no I don't think we should burn coal. My point is Nuclear has yet to pay its way anywhere in the world, without heavy heavy govt support - far exceeding that given to renewables)
Some figures on running costs:
Coal costs about £62 per MWh - (£31 for the coal and £31 for the CO2 premium we already charge the energy producers).
As a fossil fuel comparison, Gas costs about £114 per MWh.
Nuclear - Hinkley C will cost about £128 per MWh - but likely to be even higher when it comes online. And we will be on the hook for this price as long as it runs, no matter how cheap renewables are.
>Which to we ignore for coal? Cost to build a new plant? Cost to run? The decommissioning costs? (Yes we ignore the externalities, and no I don't think we should burn coal. My point is Nuclear has yet to pay its way anywhere in the world, without heavy heavy govt support - far exceeding that given to renewables)
Yes, all three. Building a nuke plant without the additional concern for outcome that we put on nuke would be relatively inexpensive. It's just concrete, pumps, and a turbine. It's a ismilar level of complexity to a coal plant. Same with running cost, same with decommissioning costs.
Suppose we designed, operated, and budgeted every coal plant to make accidents like this a statistical impossibility. Not very unlikely, that's not the standard we hold nuke to. An impossiblity. Imagine what that would cost.
If you don't count the externalities, sure. Healthcare is a cost too. We need more holistic accounting, the financialising of everything into a tidy but ultimately false P&L column is literally killing us.
Do not discount how easy that is to do. Your list is of costs not to any bottom line of a company with bean counters. Those external costs are out side the scope of their concerns. Your list of concerns would be something for C-suite types, but the pressure of stock prices again make the external costs easy to set aside.
Coal is teetering on the edge of economic viability. In the US, our coal-obsessed administration is now at the point of forcing coal power plants to remain operational against the wishes of their owners who want to shut them down as they’re no longer profitable.
The new one going to France will probably have the most impact initially, the French love to sell their Nuke's surplus capacity. The new British ones by the time they're finished should have access to British's big wind energy generation, much of which will be online at that point.
They must have been real quiet. Most the protests are related to how expensive it has become to rent / buy in this country.
Ireland has encouraged and allowed a huge number of data centers to be setup here and been very slow to implement legislation for other green forms of energy generation. We don't need dirty forms of energy production here like coal and peat just to make energy cheap. Relying on Oil and Gas leaves us hugely at the whims of the international markets.
> Ireland has encouraged and allowed a huge number of data centers to be setup here and been very slow to implement legislation for other green forms of energy generation. We don't need dirty forms of energy production here like coal and peat just to make energy cheap. Relying on Oil and Gas leaves us hugely at the whims of the international markets.
It's grid capacity more than anything which is the issue, and (like many other Irish issues) this is downstream of failures in our planning and permitting process.
Agreed. As I said in another comment it is a policy decision to rely on market forces while making little effort to reform the planning process. We should be a world leader in wind energy but the planning process holds us back hugely.
You always need some backup when the wind does not blow, although in Ireland it blows almost everyday. A deal with the UK (although Milliband has idiotically jumped way too far on the green bandwagon and prevented North Sea drilling) should guarantee that.
Real estate and energy prices are both two sides of the same coin and included in the cost of living...if you aren't aware?
Also, both of these problems are caused by the same thing: NIMBY-ism.
Modern western governments generally hate people new building new things. Whether its a renewable energy project, a fossil fuel plant, a housing development, etc. It's all the same problem.
Ireland is richer than it has ever been. Poverty and housing difficulties have nothing to do with reducing emissions.
Ireland partly got rich by being a massive CO2 polluter per capita. Now we are rich it’s only fair we lead in transitioning to renewables. Renewables are cheaper now than most forms of energy production. Grids need investment.
I despair at these short sighted and fairly wrong on the facts views.
Isn't that more about big tech companies using Ireland as a tax dodge, rather than a sign of average people doing well?
For less-well-off people, energy costs in the UK are a huge issue, they're more than twice what they were pre-Covid. Energy bills are second only to housing costs when it comes to the cost of living crisis. Although grocery price inflation/shrinkflation has been pretty shocking too.
21% of all energy is now being consumed by data centers with not enough investment in new forms of energy generation.
This is a policy decision by the government. More realistically it is a decision to not proactively do anything and instead rely on market prices to encourage new entrants to the market.
It's not a free market in Europe since there is vast amount of planning regulations involved etc. If you want to see free markets in action, look at the electricity prices in Texas, where ironically renewables are also the dominant source.
https://www.gridstatus.io/live
weird, because wouldnt part of the price for electricity include the network?
Are you telling me that the electricity purchasing is like me purchasing from amazon, but but never charges shipping, or factor it into the products, and then suddenly cant ship because all trucks are used and no money to buy new?
A very fair question and the answer is complicated. Production costs and transmission costs are separate. Also demand changes the market rate. And even if renewables are cheaper to produce in a market usually the highest price regardless of source sets the price. This is to incentivise the cheapest production methods to be invested in.
It’s a massive topic and I encourage everyone to go and dive into it. It’s endlessly fascinating and also one of the really positive stories in the world right now which can help balance your emotions in a sometimes depressing world. At least for me it does.
> This is to incentivise the cheapest production methods to be invested in.
It's also just a rule of economics. The price is set at the cost of the most expensive production necessary to meet demand.
So if solar could fulfill 100% of energy demand, price would be the cost of solar, and any other more expensive generation would either lose money, shut down or idle.
But if we shut down or idle those today we wouldn't have enough electricity, so the price rises until the more expensive plants can stay open and demand is met.
Because at the moment wind has been the winner in the Irish climate, especially when you look backwards long enough to account for the time scales over which energy buildouts occur. Renewables have grown to 40% of the overall supply, resulting in the most expensive plants (currently coal plants, and before that peat) closing. Solar is entering the market rapidly though, it grew from like 1% to 4% in the last 3 years. So I wouldn’t be surprised to see some gas plants closing in the next few years, given the more expensive options are now already gone
That rule is a rule of free markets. Electricity is not a free market, so it only partially applies. Texas is closer to a free market, and unsurprisingly it is adopting solar faster than most.
It is not that complicated. When the energy crisis in EU happened a few years ago, it demonstrated clearly that people and industry is willing to pay a years worth of energy bills for a single month to keep lights and machine operating. What this mean is that you could in concept give people free power for 11 months, and then increase electricity prices by 12x for the remaining month, and people would still pay it.
This also demonstrated through most countries in Europe that citizens will vote to have government that fix the energy market. Citizens do not want a free energy market that can raise prices to any degree, and its their tax money that fund grid stability.
This all mean that the cheapest form of producing energy do not result automatically in reduced energy costs for consumers and companies. The product that people pay for is not energy in a pure form, it is energy produced at a given time and given location. Make the energy free but the time and location expensive, and the total cost will still be expensive.
Transmission can help Ireland, but it can also hurt it by linking it to a larger market that can create a even higher demand spikes than exist in the current local grid. If the linked grid has locations which has higher energy costs than Ireland, then Ireland will subsidize those people by linking the markets together. Rules like highest price regardless of source sets the price, and higher amount of transmissions, also tend to result in more companies getting paid to maintain operations and thus more parties getting paid that is not linked to the marginal cost of producing energy.
It's really not. Energy grids are not designed for distributed generation. In my US state, that means billions of infrastructure investment.
The people using carbon to create forcing functions to transition to renewables conveniently forget to mention that. Which sucks, as solar in particular is almost a miracle product, but at this point my delivery charges to get electricity exceed the electricity supply by 10%. 20 years ago, delivery was 30% of supply.
My state, New York, decided it would be smart to turn off the nuclear plant that supplies 20% of NYC electricity, and replace it over a decade with a rube goldberg arrangement of gas, offshore wind, solar, and Canadian imports. The solar is hampered by distribution capacity, gas was slowed down by corruption and is being limited by environmental activists, we elected a president that believes that windmills give you cancer, and of course we are picking fights with Canada now.
In a vast over simplfication, the most expensive producer that gets to supply sets the overall price. So even if you supply 99% from wind and hydro, the 1% of power that comes from gas sets the price for 100% of the electricity in the market.
When gas gets more expensive, electricity from gas gets more expensive. The more you have to rely on gas (because you don‘t have batteries, not enough solar, etc), the more you pay high prices.
There are different ways to address these issues. Demand side load management, batteries, etc.
Solar is priced based on gas prices as a financial incentive to encourage producers to build solar. That’s because profiting from the difference between the cost of production for solar and the cost of production from gas is supposed to be the incentive to build solar.
The gas prices went up massively in 2022 with the war in Ukraine, and even though that subsided before the war in Iran a little, the existing supply companies are not going to give back an increase in the price they’ve gained because their prices dropped.
You would have to normalize against other costs and do a deep dive to really understand. My first question would be whether electricity (commercial and residential) has become relatively more expensive than gas, beer, and other commodities. If it's the same rate then it's more of an overall inflation thing. If electricity really is far and away higher than the rest over time then one would have to look at laws, the grid, demand, and of course supply too.
> You would have to normalize against other costs and do a deep dive to really understand.
The tricky part here is that energy is an input to basically everything. It's a major (through fertiliser) input to food, and then all of transport and stocking of said food which tends to be how energy changes influence downstream inflation. So I think you'd probably need a deeper analysis to tease out these issues.
> Ireland partly got rich by being a massive CO2 polluter per capita. Now we are rich it’s only fair we lead in transitioning to renewables. Renewables are cheaper now than most forms of energy production. Grids need investment.
Sorry, what? While I agree with you about reducing emissions, most of our transition from poor to rich(er) was driven by capital light businesses. To be fair, the pharma companies did come here because we refused to regulate spillovers up to EU standards, but that's less than half of the story.
tl;dr loads of golf courses, english speaking population, smart industrial plannng and tax dodging was really how it happened.
None of those things were possible without the fossil fuel based energy underlying everything. Every single wealthy country used energy from fossil fuels to escape poverty. Some to a greater degree than others but that’s the basic reality. Now we have a way out of fossil fuels and we must take it or things will get even worse than they are already going to get anyway. And I did say it was only part of the story, albeit essential.
> Now we are rich it’s only fair we lead in transitioning to renewables
Unfortunately it's not the people/generation who reaped the rewards from cheap energy and polluting who are now being made to feel the pain of the transition.
> Ireland partly got rich by being a massive CO2 polluter per capita.
This argument that we have to self destruct to have the moral highground just keeps getting repeated, for maybe two decades now.
We, as in the West, got there first because we are luckier/better organised/evil colonialists/whatever, take your pick it doesn't matter.
China DGAF about our self perceived virtuousness, they know windpower and solar are not viable long term, they're just happy to sell us more panels and propellers like any other widget from a factory with a profit margin. Web search how many Chinese coal plants came online in the last six months.
> they know windpower and solar are not viable long term
That’s why they are installing it all over their country at the fastest pace of any country by far? That’s why they probably hit peak oil consumption?
The coal thing is complicated in China. They are replacing many old coal stations, local governments are fearful of being caught short in a cold winter which has happened. Rate of coal consumption increases is slowing. Peak coal may have happened last year.
>"China is the world's top electricity producer from renewable energy sources. China's renewable energy capacity is growing faster than its fossil fuels and nuclear power capacity.[1] China installed over 373 GW of renewables in 2024, reaching a total installed renewable capacity of 1,878 GW by the end of the year. The country aims to have 80% of its total energy mix come from non-fossil fuel sources by 2060, and achieve a combined 1,200 GW of solar and wind capacity by 2030.[1]
>Although China currently has the world's largest installed capacity of hydro, solar and wind power, its energy needs are so large that some fossil fuel sources are still used."
Seems more renewables came online than non-renewables, perhaps your take is outdated?
With its population and size, China will top production. But their coal plants have been coming up more than every other country combined. It's the percentages, not the absolutes.
People keep forgetting in all the China-posting that China is a country of 1.4 billion people, approximately 256 times the size of the Irish population, and therefore it's not really surprising when it tops a "top consumption" or "top production" list of any kind.
(second most populous after India)
Alternatively, if all Ireland was a city in China, it would not be in the list of top 50 cities by population.
While it's not surprising that's in the top, it's surprising by how much. ~1/7th of the world population, but ~55% of coal consumption is pretty unbalanced IMO. Of course, the real reason why is that China is the world's factory so the energy consumption is huge as well.
I think the real takeaway here is that the world depends on the industrial production of China, which is powered by coal. We are all using that coal to buy cheap Chinese manufactured goods, and the sooner we come to terms with this the better. Whether a single country uses coal or not is irrelevant for tackling carbon emissions, if we're all basically exporting our carbon emissions to China.
India is building 41 coal plant, China is building 289. India approved 5 more plants, China approved 405. China is building more coal power than all other countries combined including India.
This thread is crazy. guys just look at numbers first...
> "This argument that we have to self destruct to have the moral highground"
That's not the argument they made.
> "they know windpower and solar are not viable long term"
Thanks for the nonsensical, unsupported, right-wing talking points, throwaway account. Great contribution.
> "Web search how many Chinese coal plants came online in the last six months."
I web searched and found that "China installed a record 315 GW (AC) of new solar capacity in 2025". The entire UK national grid is currently providing 35GW of power from all sources combined. That's 1/9th of the power China deployed in just solar panels just last year. And China deployed 119GW of wind turbines in the same year as well.
And are you sure about your claim? Every time I hear anything about China and Solar the core of it is that solar in China is growing more than anywhere else on the planet ( 40% increase in 2025 and creating ~11% of China's energy already )
And that there is no sign of that trend slowing down anytime soon. And why would it. Solar panels are dirt cheap and they have more than enough space for it.
China is also really strong in the battery space, so they have everything they need to ditch oil/coal eventually
They also are building more coal, gas, and nuclear than anyone else at epic yearly increases.
That they have the internal political means to get large infrastructure projects done is laudible - they can actually build transmission lines that make unreliable energy sources like solar and wind feasible. In the US that is effectively impossible due to the NIMBY legal situation.
That they lead in battery production is going to be pretty interesting to watch. I admit I was skeptical that current battery tech could be scaled up enough to make it financially doable, but China is very close to making me wrong on the topic. If they can be the first to truly seasonal storage that works without hand-waving games like pretending you can "just use another source" when you run out of storage I'll be very impressed.
They seem to understand that you need to back unreliable sources with reliable sources - and have the political means to build a coal plant that will sit idle 95% of the time.
No other country is close - it's parlor tricks at the moment. China seems to understand how energy works, and that you need a reliable grid to run an industrial economy. They are very much being pragmatic in how they are building out everything they possibly can. The West has forgotten this.
They’re building more dirty plants than anyone, but they’re STILL making their mix cleaner at an impressive clip. Over 80% of new electric demand growth was met by renewables in 2024.
> They also are building more coal, gas, and nuclear than anyone else at epic yearly increases.
Are they really? Coal use for power generation stopped growing, so newly built coal plants are replacing older, not adding to them. Nuclear while still being built does not seem to be accelerating anymore.
There's plenty to criticize about China, but as far as energy production goes they are a leader and have demonstrated what can be done when the country is aligned (albeit by force in this case) to provide cheap and clean energy to power their economy.
The US, under the current admin, is literally the opposite of that.
if solar and wind is subsidized by europe or usa, selling solar and wind to them is great. taxpayer money goes east, everybody is happy, meanwhile china is constructing more coal plants than all the other countries combined https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/number-of...
China leads the world in solar energy, by a wide margin. Yes, they have hedged their bets somewhat with coal, but you cannot claim with a straight face that China believes renewable energy is nonviable.
Steelman: in the 2000's and 2010's China did not know if wind power and solar were viable in the long term. They put a lot of money in wind & solar, but also lots of alternatives: nuclear, coal, hydro, geothermal.
By 2020 it was obvious that wind & solar were viable long term, so investments in nuclear et al dried up. But they weren't convinced that batteries were viable long term, so they built a lot of coal peakers for night power.
By 2025 it became obvious that batteries were more viable and cheaper than coal peakers, so they've started to build battery storage at a vast scale.
So steelman is that the OP's viewpoint is ~10 years out of date.
> Over the last few years, we've graduated from providing cheap energy to now importing most of our energy.
Back in days of yore (2006/07) I read a well-argued policy paper from a quango that no longer exists where it pointed out that Ireland was one of the most fossil fuel dependent nations in the world (particularly due to oil imports).
Our energy prices first spiked around the same time, to "incentivise competition" in the words of a minister of the time.
All the while we have vast, vast reserves of potential wind energy sitting unused because of (mostly) grid and permitting failures. This was and is entirely in our control, but the government(s) (even with the sad exception of the Greens) simply haven't put enough resources into it (although the grid is getting investment, we need a lot more).
Also the critical infrastructure bill will (supposedly) help, but I'm sceptical as none of this ever seems to help.
Which is to say, that I completely agree with you that the costs here shouldn't be born by the poorer people in Ireland, and we need a whole of government approach to driving down the price of energy. This will take time, but the best time to start doing this is now.
My personal belief is that we should also aim to drive down the price of land, as the two biggest costs (for many countries) are land and energy, as they input into almost everything, but reducing land prices is a lot more controversial than reducing energy prices so we should start there.
Yup, things kinda suck because of our complete failure to get our fingers out here. Again, people keep trying to build better stuff, but the planning process and our very decentralised democratic processes don't. help.
You don't have to, but you make more profit if you do. An energy producer that has the choice to sell energy for a lower price domestically or a higher price internationally will obviously choose the higher price, but you can make laws to make that illegal, if you want to.
Taiwan and perhaps other Asian countries that successfully make stuff don't expose their industries to this, the government sets a fixed energy price for them rather than leaving them at the whim of speculators.
"TAIPEI (TVBS News) — Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰) announced on Tuesday (Nov. 19 2024) plans to subsidize Taiwan Power Company (台灣電力公司) with NT$100 billion to address rising international fuel costs and stabilize prices"
=> over $3bn USD! This is not a small amount of money.
I agree that the government should ensure low energy prices for industry, but Taiwan is a remarkably poor example.
Taiwan's energy policy is, as far as I know, the most pants-on-head stupid of any country in the world. As anyone knows, they are a small island at constant risk of a sea blockade and yet rely on sea imports for 98% of their energy. Not only that, but they _had_ more domestic production (nuclear) that they have been phasing out. Writing giant checks to import yet more oil by sea instead of boosting domestic production is a terrible idea for so many reasons.
You are right that Taiwan doesn't. But it has consequences, Taipower is forced to undercharge against market prices, but is backstopped by the government.
At the end of the day, it's a global market, and if you want it 'cheap' someone has to pick up the tab. Either it's taxpayers now, taxpayers in the future or consumers now.
Ireland hasn't mined any coal in 35 years, this plant was not operating on domestic resources to begin with.
Anyway your actual problem are data center buildouts that are causing demand to skyrocket. They've gone from 5% of your electrical demand to >20% in less than a decade, and are the primary cause of your electricity crunch.
And even when we did mine coal, it was a small amount, and this plant never received any of it. It was designed from the start to run on imported coal, brought in on ships, and did not even have a rail connection.
I do often wonder with this kind of thing whether an unspoken aspect of it is about not depleting the country's fossil fuels
From what I understand Ireland has very little natural gas, very little coal and a not particularly large amount of peat. If they didn't shift towards importing all of that would be gone in the very near future.
It's a bit weird how it gets branded as a solely green move when there's clearly other motives for it.
For practical purposes no coal. There are no working coal mines in Ireland, and Moneypoint would have run entirely on imported coal since it was built. It was built with a bulk handling terminal for this purpose (very visible in photos of the plant: https://esb.ie/news---insights/inside-esb/moneypoint-power-s...).
Note that it doesn't have a rail link; even if there had been the desire to use domestic coal and someone had gotten a mine going, there would have been no way to get it there.
Lots of signal that this top post is now an LLM an not "an Irish man". The generous use of dashes to complete the thought process..have a look: https://www.dcaulfield.com/chatgpt-learning-dev
Even if you ignore the climate impact, fossil fuels pollution causes millions of premature deaths a year, and unlike with global warming, that effect is localized. That alone should be reason to transition off of fossil fuels, especially coal which is the dirtiest.
Here in England we now drag the coal over on smoke spewing ships from Japan and Australia, rather than mine it here. The sum total of CO2 is higher than if we just mined it here. Net zero box ticking.
Goal-shifting aside, and be that as it may for offshoring, but Neoliberalism was Thatcher, and she was popular in part because the trade unions were seen as too powerful, which in part was because of the then-recent history of the coal miners' union going on strike and forcing a three-day week for much of British industry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Day_Week
So glad you're taking the hit for the rest of us. Your sacrifice is totally worth the .001% difference you make, every little bit counts.
Why is it people can clearly see the recycling scam for what it was, but the idea of coal or carbon fuels makes them entirely unable to handle any sort of thinking that isn't entirely superficial and one-sided?
Maybe, like everything else in life, it's a complex series of tradeoffs, costs, and benefits, and you decide whether the cost is worth the benefit.
And if a policy being pushed doesn't make sense when all the costs and benefits are accounted for, then someone is doing something shady and making a shit ton of money, especially if there's a huge amount of smoke and mirrors and politicized talk.
Ireland's being used for things and it's obvious those in power don't care about and don't think the Irish people being affected by these sorts of policies can or will do anything about it. As that largely seems to be the case, I have to wonder if we're going to see a repeat of what seems to happen every time a government thinks that about the Irish and takes advantage of them.
We never had particularly cheap energy. The recent increases in energy cost were largely driven by gas price increases due to the war in Ukraine.
> we've graduated from providing cheap energy to now importing most of our energy.
... Eh? We've always imported most of our energy. Or, well, okay, since about the mid 19th century we've imported most of our energy. All coal used in Moneypoint was imported. We do produce some of our own gas, but it is not and never has been enough. The fraction of energy that we import has actually fallen somewhat due to wind and solar.
Electricity generated from peat peaked at 19.5% in 1990, apparently.
And that's far outstripped by the current figure for renewables (42% in 2025) - so renewables have enabled locally-sourced production to reach more than double the share that was ever managed in the peat-burning days.
(And the comparison is actually even better than it seems at first glance, given that the 2025 figures are all-island and the peat figures would be 3 or 4 points lower if you included NI. A good chunk of the 23.2% imports can probably also be classed as renewable, given that GB had a 47% renewable mix)
Another Irishman here, completely agree with your comment. My domestic gas and electric bills have never been higher, insane inflation for nothing more than political virtue signalling.
> Another Irishman here, completely agree with your comment. My domestic gas and electric bills have never been higher, insane inflation for nothing more than political virtue signalling.
The only part of your bills that could be regarded as virtue signalling is the carbon tax, which is driven by government regulation. The vast increases in energy costs were driven firstly by Russia (when they invaded Ukraine) and the US (when they attacked Iran).
And this hits me too, I have (unfortunately) oil heating which has gone from about 500 to 800 over the course of the last week. Fortunately we filled up last month, but it's really worrying.
Ultimately though, the only way to fix this is to build a lot of wind (industrial scale) and solar (residential scale) as otherwise we're at the mercy of world events.
An LNG terminal wouldn't help with cost (it would probably increase it a bit, if anything, as the cost of building it would have to be paid back). It's desirable from an energy _security_ perspective; as it is we are very dependent on a pipeline to Britain.
Actually it should help with both, because a on-island terminal would also provide LNG storage capacity which would buffer short-term price fluctuations. We have zero such storage.
Again, our poor decision making around national infrastructure is on our governments. They left have left us completely exposed to international markets.
A lot of it relates to the planning process, they do keep trying to build things. One could argue that this is also their fault (and I do!) but there are good historical reasons (cough ray burke cough michael lowry) why we've ended up with such a bureaucratic, byzantine planning process.
Yeah, even though I voted (happily) for the Greens, I was very disappointed in them not building an LNG terminal, purely for energy security reasons. I'd be super happy if it never got used, but it's a cost worth paying just in case.
An LNG terminal would not help for the current high prices. Europe is experiencing a gas price shock precisely because LNG is easy to store and transport. Asia gets half it's gas through the Strait of Hormuz, which is currently experiencing troubles. This means Asia is willing to pay a lot of premium for LNG, which in turn means that Europe has to match this premium otherwise LNG will go to Asia and not Europe.
Being dependent on gas is equal to being exposed to global shocks, unless you can cover your domestic needs purely with domestic gas extraction.
American energy exports are turning around in the mid-atlantic to go somewhere else instead because Europe is getting outbid.
"My energy prices are high" because you are getting outbid. You can't stop getting outbid by building more transport infrastructure. That terminal will go unused.
> Ultimately though, the only way to fix this is to build a lot of wind (industrial scale) and solar (residential scale) as otherwise we're at the mercy of world events.
I'd add that this is only part of the equation because: what do you do on an overcast day with no wind?
You need significant storage capacity before you can become isolated from world events. Until then, you need power generation that you can bring online on short notice: coal, gas, hydro, etc. Traditionally, gas was used for this because it's easy to store, quick to get going and gas plants can also burn coal if needed.
Unfortunately, the nice properties of gas (easy to store and transport) mean that it's a global commodity. It will go where they pay the most, which means that far away events can cause a price in gas prices globally.
> I'd add that this is only part of the equation because: what do you do on an overcast day with no wind?
Battery technology is really, really getting there.
And in the absence of any more improvements here (unlikely) you integrate your grids with other countries. That's harder for Ireland, but it's still worth doing.
Carbon taxes are huge, and they are 100% politically imposed.
And they're often disingenously included in fossil fuel pricing to claim that green energy is fundamentally cheaper.
I believe in climate change, and I believe in doing something about it. But being disingenous with the public is only going to create resentment and resistance to Net Zero.
> And they're often disingenously included in fossil fuel pricing to claim that green energy is fundamentally cheaper.
There’s nothing unreasonable about this: fossil fuels have huge costs associated with them that are invisible to the consumer. They’ve just been getting pushed off onto other people forever.
Don't let the populist sentiment gain you, this has nothing to do with environmentalism. You want a scape-goat? Blame the decades of neoliberalism that led to such under-investments in our public infrastructure.
ChatGPT : "tell me about China use of coal energy"
"China is by far the largest consumer and producer of coal in the world. Coal has historically been the backbone of China’s rapid industrialization and still plays a dominant role in its energy system."
- ~55–60% of China’s electricity comes from coal (varies slightly year to year).
- China consumes more coal than the rest of the world combined.
- Annual consumption: roughly 4–4.5 billion tons per year.
- China produces about 50% of global coal output
The west suffers while China does whatever it wants, at a Grand Scale.
Yes, China consumes a lot of coal. But they are trying to consume less. You cannot ask a developing country to go back on its merging into the first world by consuming less energy or investing in more expensive sources only. We westerners are here because we grew on cheap and dirty energy, what moral ground do we have to ask them to stop growing?
Coal was almost 100% of China energy consumption only 15 years ago, with a bit of hydro. Today they are very aggressively shifting towards anything but coal, as you found in ChatGPT, to less than 60% of coal in the mix. For comparison, the US is almost at the same point today than 15 years ago, only significantly replaced coal with more gas. A country that is consuming about the same amount of energy since 2000, while China consumes 5x.
Ireland hasn't mined coal at all for about 40 years and _never_ really mined any significant part of its usage; even in the 19th century Ireland imported coal. Moneypoint was designed from the start to run on imported coal; it had no rail link, and a bloody great bulk-handling port attached to it. Getting rid of Moneypoint actually increased energy security (we do produce _some_ of our own natural gas, and the renewables don't require imports).
It's a marker of low IQ populism to believe things are simple and that the elite/technocracy/whatever is trying to hide that truth from us while making sure to never research why that might be so that they can keep on playing the blame game.
No if you allow to exit the simplistic low/high IQ paradigm you set up, I just can't take seriously comments like this who have not even started to try to show that they have any grip on the subject at all. Heck you haven't even tried to assess the quantity/availability of Ireland's "own resource". Do you seriously want Ireland to relay on peat ? How long would that last ?
The real insanity is to keep burning that coal, that we know will render large part of the Earth uninhabitable if we don't stop ASAP. Also, it's more expensive than cleaner energy. You want a culprit so bad? Blame EU neoliberalism whose auterity has diverted important, necessary funds from our energy grid and left us in this delicate position.
Same in the UK. Instead of us generating electricity via coal, we get other people to do it less cleanly and import it instead. That way our hands are clean.
Another Irishman here.
Stop trying to harken back to some notional "good old days" that didn't exist. People are better off than they've ever been.
Energy was always expensive relative to income. When I was a kid in the 80s, we weren't allowed to turn on the central heating unless there were arctic conditions. The main issue driving COL issues is the complete lack of social housing construction for the last 15 years. You can't blame the tree huggers for that. Renewable energy is a matter of national security, and prevents our hard earned money being sent overseas to regimes like Russia and all the charmers in the Middle East. Our very first electricity plant as a free state was hydro ffs.
I have never been to a country where the wind blows at plus 60kph for months at a time (Wexford). I don't think I have ever been there in the last 20 years where the wind has not been howling, the potential for Wind Power there is insane.....
Hey you're still better than Germany that closed all their eco friendly power down and started importing so much energy it's had an effect on prices in Sweden!
I mean, at least you shut down the coal plants, those are legit bad for the environment. Germans shut down nuclear which is clean.
https://beyondfossilfuels.org/europes-coal-exit/ keeps track of coal phase-out commitments. 24 European countries still use coal generators, and 6 have not even planned to phase them out (Serbia, Moldova, Turkey, Poland, Kosovo, Bosnia).
Never used coal power:
Albania, Cyprus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Switzerland, Norway
Phased out:
2016: Belgium
2020: Sweden, Austria
2021: Portugal
2024: United Kingdom
2025: Ireland
Phase-out planned:
2026: Slovakia, Greece
2027: France
2028: Italy, Denmark
2029: The Netherlands, Hungary, Finland
2030: Spain, North Macedonia
2032: Romania
2033: Slovenia, Czechia, Croatia
2035: Ukraine
2038: Germany
2040: Bulgaria
2041: Montenegro
For Sweden, the coal plants were exclusively for cogeneration (district heating with electricity as a byproduct) and only used as peaker plants in winter. Some of them still exist but have been converted to burn biofuels instead, mostly woodchips and other byproducts from the forestry industry.
For most practical purposes, Swedish electricity generation has been basically fossile free since the 1980's.
This is true. A nuance often missed. Different rock (that is considerably worse in several ways, needs heavy fuel oil to be added to actually burn and has I think even higher co2 output per unit of energy) but kinda the same.
> Albania, Cyprus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Switzerland, Norway
I very much doubt this is true for any of those countries. In fact, I know it is untrue for Switzerland, although they did stop using it long ago (mid 20th century).
Edit: Norway actually ran a coal power plant until 2023, on Spitsbergen
This is now how we should be looking at the problem. It doesn't matter if you burn coal yourself or not. What matters is the source of your energy. Every single one of those countries imports energy from other markets which consume fossil fuels for production.
No country will be truly coal-free until they are a net energy exporter and they do not import any goods that use coal-based energy in their supply chain. Europe has de-industrialized which means it has effectively exported its coal burden.
Being coal-free is possible. Being fossil-fuel free is harder. Most of Irish energy comes from Natural Gas and Oil - the former is what supplanted Coal, not Wind.
Being coal free is a good enough goal in itself, getting off fossil fuels completely in the short term was always a stupid, irrational and religious idea.
If the world transitioned everything currently on coal to Nat gas, along with population decline that's happening, it solves the worst effects of climate change for the rest our lives (Nat gas provides the same power as coal at half the emissions, so 2X less Co2 and 10X less on many air pollutants).
And in the next 100 years if we haven't made fossil fuels irrelevant with cheap modular fission OR made fusion viable OR made space solar viable, then something horrible has happened and Co2 emissions will be the least of our worries.
I agree. Whenever numbers show that China is the largest CO2 polluter currently, it needs to be mentioned that China manufactures much of the world's physical goods.
- Peak coal usage is likely to be very soon in China (this year even according to some); after that coal usage flatten and start declining; all the way to a planned net zero in the 2060s.
The newer plants are designed to be more efficient, more flexible, and less polluting than the older ones. They are better at starting/stopping quickly/cheaply. Older coal plants used big boilers that had to heat up to build up steam before being able to generate power. This makes stopping and starting a plant slow and expensive. Because they consume a lot of fuel just to get the plant to the stage where it can actually generate power. The more often plants have to be stopped and started, the more wasteful this is. With the newer plants this is less costly and faster.
This makes them more suitable to be used in a non base load operational model where they can be spun up/down on a need to have basis. This is essential in a power grid that is dominated by the hundreds of GW of solar, wind, and battery.
Their existing grid uses coal because they have coal, just like the US uses gas because it has gas. And obviously as old coal plants are retired they're going to build new ones. They don't use the new plants for additional capacity. As they add more solar and storage, which they're building a lot of, they're going to absolutely crush the coal burning too. It's literally a national security issue for them.
As other posters below you have pointed out, it's not as simple as you make it out. You can't just stop building power plants overnight. The population and demands of China are growing and those needs need to be met immediately. There is no simpler, more understood way of rolling out new energy than building coal & gas power plants.
But look at the data. They are building clean energy solutions at a faster rate than any other country on the planet - by a huge margin. Scaling clean energy solutions is what we need, and it has to be done alongside the gradual phase-out of coal and gas.
Coal is a lot cheaper and easier than modern energy sources when your goal is modernizing rural areas. Meanwhile, urban centers are decommissioning old emissive power plants and shifting to renewables. It's a fine way to do green transition and rural development.
As other comments already point out, chinese coal power plants do not always operate under full load. They also decomission older more polluting ones.
Setting that aside, China has also dramatically pushed the electrification of their transportation sector like no one else. Considering BEVs and other electric modes of transport require less primary energy than fossil fuel equivalents, this checks out.
It should also be mentioned that despite being the factory of the world, China's CO2 emissions per capita are nearly half of the United States and comparable to some European countries.
> It should also be mentioned that despite being the factory of the world, China's CO2 emissions per capita are nearly half of the United States and comparable to some European countries.
To be fair, there's a large (~300mn) agricultural population in China who don't use developed country levels of energy. Nonetheless, this is still good.
Rural areas do not use much energy but Chinese cities are also more energy efficient per capita because of density and use of public transportation, walking, or electric mini scooters.
Somehow that’s an often missed aspect of this. Yeah, ditching coal has a wide array of nice side effects. It has killed many, many more than the world’s nuclear accidents.
It's worse than that, it's every 3 to 7 hours of fossil fuel pollution roughly equaling the total death toll of all nuclear power accidents in history (around 4000 indirectly, most from cancer resulting from Chernobyl - but there's only around 100 total in a direct way).
I think that depends on where you draw the line around the term "coal plant." There have been plenty of coal ash disasters that result in years of exclusion (for purposes of habitation, drinking water, fishing, etc.)[1][2][3][4]
Have you ever seen the common medical advice that pregnant women should avoid eating more than a few servings of seafood every week, and avoid certain kinds entirely, because they’re all contaminated with mercury? A huge portion of that mercury comes from burning coal. How’s that for an exclusion zone?
If you look at net damage to the planet, fossil fuel burning energy sources kill literally 8 million+ people a year. Coal plants are vastly more radioactive than nuclear plants, and the effects of burning coal will have a vastly outsized share of damage to the planet in the long than nuclear. Its effects are just less concentrated to a single area.
And not all nuclear plants are the same. I don’t think it’s reasonable at all to compare Chernobyl to modern reactor designs, just because they both use the word “nuclear”.
Apso not sure if you are including coal mining, and all of the deaths and negative health outcomes as a result of the industry
Most of the exclusion zone is political nonsense. And overall coal has made much more areas much worse to live in. I rather live in the exclusion zone then next many coal plants.
Also there is a single case that happened from a non-western design. When looking at western countries like France, it shows how incredibly safe the whole industry is end to end.
Chernobyl's political nonsense was mostly down to the USSR wanting to deny that anything had, or possibly could, go wrong; if anything, the exclusion zone is the opposite of the western nonsense about nuclear power.
It's our unique freedom-themed nonsense, not the Soviet dictatorial-nonsense, which means we have radiation standards strict enough that it's not possible to convert a coal plant into a nuclear plant without first performing a nuclear decontamination process due to all the radioisotopes in the coal.
> When looking at western countries like France, it shows how incredibly safe the whole industry is end to end.
Relative to coal, absolutely. But don't assume western countries are immune to propaganda on these things, nuclear reactors are there for the spicy atoms, not the price tag or public safety.
Because coal desposits in the ground have bits of Uranium and Thorium which are radioactive, they get concentrated in coal fly ash, and blow out the chimney in the smoke from a coal power plant, and kill people, they leach into the soil and waterways, and kill people.
That is, nuclear power plants only kill people by radioactivity in the case of an accident. Coal power plants do it in normal operation. As well as coal dust having a PM2.5 dust problem which kills people.
Make it about nuclear vs coal because people say coal is better than nuclear because it's not scary radiation, and it actually is.
> "Both are bad"
Nuclear generates more power from a Kg of fuel, with less CO2 pollution and fewer deaths. It's not bad, but even if it was bad it's not "both sides", it's much less bad.
Nuclear energy can be used to generate 24x7 energy as the grid-power to supply energy to a country whereas Solar and Wind require batteries.
I think that the last time I checked, when you take into factor the CO2 emissions and everything, Nuclear is the best source of Energy.
> I don’t think nuclear is the answer to things
I think that I am interested in seeing thorium based reactors or development with that too. That being said, Nuclear feels like the answer to me.
Feel free to correct me if you think I am wrong but I don't think that there is any better form of energy source than nuclear when you factor in everything.
Daytime doesn't mean the sun is out; the UK has heavy cloud cover and sunset near 4pm in mid-winter. https://grid.iamkate.com/ shows the UK is currently getting 10% of grid power from Solar at 3:30pm in March.
Sure. That's why there's the "interconnectors" section further down; the UK can take advantage of the fact that it's rarely simultaneously dark and zero wind across entire continents.
> Batteries are cheaper and faster to make in large quantities.
Yes I agree but their extraction at scale is still very C02 Expensive.
> No economy on the planet needs 24/7 peak power production. The times humans work correspond nicely with the times the sun is out.
With Nuclear energy, let's face it. If you have a nuclear plant running, the input is just some uranium which we have plenty of. Thereotically we have no problem with running at peak power production.
You are also forgetting that Sun can be blocked during times of rains and Wind is unpredictable as well.
If you can work with solar panels only that's really really great. Unfortunately that's not how the world works or how I see it function :(
You are forgetting that markets operate after work and the late night culture and so many other things. You need lights at energy and quite a decent bit. You are also forgetting that if we ever get Electric vehicles then we would need energy during late night as well.
A lot of energy in general is still needed during nights and would we be still burning coal for that?
With all of this, I am not sure why you'd not like Nuclear?
> You are also forgetting that Sun can be blocked during times of rains and Wind is unpredictable as well.
We already have wires that cross continents to smooth out supply variations. It's exceedingly rare you get no sun and no wind over entire continents for an extended period.
> You are forgetting that markets operate after work and the late night culture and so many other things.
> We already have wires that cross continents to smooth out supply variations. It's exceedingly rare you get no sun and no wind over entire continents for an extended period.
I can be wrong but you would probably lose tons of efficiency even within High Voltage DC lines if everyday late night we take energy from different countries. Also this is getting outside of topic of discussion for me because one of the reasons we want Nuclear or Green energy in general is also the environmental plus the sovereign plus the long term affordability plans.
Another point from your first comment but if we run peak production in nuclear say in a country A, then the country A can also give power to Country B at late night similar to what you are proposed for solars.
> Again, batteries.
Once again, within my first comment I raise issue of battery. You mention a comment and I respond and then we get to batteries again.
I have no problem with solar at all without batteries but batteries really flip the equation in terms of environmental concerns.
My question is plain and simple, Why not Nuclear? I understand, I am not against Solar. Although environmentally, I feel like battery is a valid concern.
I am just saying that long term, Nuclear seems to be the better/best option. Why not Nuclear? That is a question which it seems that you may not have answered and that's a discussion worth having as well In my opinion too.
> You mention a comment and I respond and then we get to batteries again.
Yes. Because they're the answer here.
> Also this is getting outside of topic of discussion for me because one of the reasons we want Nuclear or Green energy in general is also the environmental plus the sovereign plus the long term affordability plans.
Good luck with nuclear sovereignty, if that's your concern. How many uranium mines are in the UK?
> Why not Nuclear?
/me gestures at the last 50 years of historical evidence
"Why not try nuclear" is like "why not try communism?" for physics nerds. We have tried it.
> Good luck with nuclear sovereignty, if that's your concern. How many uranium mines are in the UK?
I can't speak about UK but considering how cheap Uranium is, can UK not do cost analysis. Uranium is abundant material compared to Oil/Coal.
> /me gestures at the last 50 years of historical evidence
> "Why not try nuclear" is like "why not try communism?" for physics nerds. We have tried it.
Maybe, but I think that, I can speak about the problem within US which I can better explain but US had nuclear fearmongering attempts and Senators passed laws which increased regulations on it to the point that some regulations contradict past regulations.
Nuclear power plants being built on loan in such a flimsy regulatory market was what lead to the downfall essentially within US
Nuclear fearmongering and lobbying efforts from Oil Industry as they are one of the most strong opposers of nuclear energy[0]
Once again, how do I explain this but nuclear produces 3.2x less carbon emissions than Solar[1]
We are able to build hydropower plants, we are able to launch spaceships into moon and outer space. It's definitely possible to build nuclear if lobbying effort decreases.
I'd say that its our dependence on Oil and Coal which have been the problem. I have nothing against solar and that is something that I am saying from the start. At some point we should look towards transition towards nuclear as well. To give up on that would simply not be ideal.
> I can't speak about UK but considering how cheap Uranium is, can UK not do cost analysis. Uranium is abundant material compared to Oil/Coal.
Wait until you hear how cheap and abundant sunlight and wind are!
Economically useful uranium deposits are only proven in a handful of countries.
> We are able to build hydropower plants, we are able to launch spaceships into moon and outer space. It's definitely possible to build nuclear if lobbying effort decreases.
This is the "well we haven't tried real communism" argument again.
Not cost competitive with solar+batteries in many locales (less so the closer to the poles), and no learning curve, if anything a negative learning curve, nuclear never was more expensive than new nuclear.
And off course societal (and geopolitical) acceptance issues.
Respectfully, Can you tell me more about it because I genuinely don't know how you think Nuclear energy is bad. It's one of the cleanest forms of energy.
Is there any particular reason why you think Nuclear is bad in all honesty as its worth having a discussion here? Why do you feel Nuclear Energy is a hazard?
I understand if you feel Chernobyl or any event makes it sound dangerous but rather, Please take a look at this data on the number of death rates per unit of electricity production[0]
Oil is roughly 615x more deadly than nuclear. Nuclear, Solar and Wind (the renewables) are all less deadly and are 0.03,0.02 and 0.04 respectively and nuclear is a reliable source of energy source which can be used in actual generation.
Nuclear is very much a green energy. I'd like to hear your opinion about it.
Europe is less industrial than in the past, but by every measure I can find many countries (especially Germany, Poland, Slovakia, Italy) are significantly more industrialized than the US - around 1.5x to 3x as much industrial activity and employment per capita, depending on the measure. Even the very least industrialized of the major EU nations (e.g. Spain, Greece) only just drop down to match the US numbers per-capita.
The issue is very complex. First - broad generalization - Europe's surviving industry is mostly made of less critical industries. If you look at important things in the world, and the important things that make up or make those important things, a tiny fraction of that is European, and that fraction is shrinking rapidly. There are some things - there is some green manufacturing stuff going on, there is some high-precision stuff in IT/CH/DE, there is ASML and Airbus, Poland can actually make things, etc. - but where will that be in ten or twenty years? I'll tell you: the high-precision stuff is rapidly moving to Asia, the green manufacturing is not very cost effective and uses a lot of imported core technologies, the C919 is going to fly with Chinese engines soon... the list goes on. The EU badly wants to make solar panels, cutting edge chips, fighter jets, rockets et cetera - and it simply can't, not at the cutting edge. The US, on the other hand, can make all of those things. It is still behind China in manufacturing overall, but it can still make a lot of the cutting edge, and it is still innovating.
Second, a lot of the EU stuff is already dead and only continues to exist through inertia. The median German cars and machine tools are worse than the median Chinese and they cost far more.
Third, those numbers often reflect the nebulous concept of "value added." Let's take the case of a refrigerator. Chinese company manufactures every technical part of the refrigerator and ships it to their EU business partner for €100. EU partner assembles it, fills it with foam, and sells it for €600. Most of the "value added" was in the EU! Win for the EU! Go EU manufacturing! The concept of "value added" is the basis for the entire EU VAT system and much of its economic indicators and incentives, while in the US it is almost never mentioned. This is also the source of the most hilarious comparisons (Greek manufacturing superior to the US per capita? χαχαχα)
If you want to cut through the bullshit, you have to look at actual things made. Among the US/CN/EU, who leads: Solar panels (CN), cutting edge chips (US), chipmaking equipment (EU), jet engines (US), aircraft (US), space launch vehicles (US), fighter jets (US), batteries (CN), nuclear reactors (CN), submarines (US), advanced missiles (US), cars (CN), CNC machines (CN), machine tools (CN), precision bearings and linear motion systems (CN), cutting edge medical equipment (US), gas turbines (US/EU), high voltage grid equipment (CN), telecom equipment (CN), construction equipment (US), ships (CN), advanced optics (EU), electric motors (CN), steel (CN), aluminum (CN), oil (US), cutting edge pharma (US), industrial robots (CN), wind turbines (CN), trains (CN), agricultural machinery (US/EU), drones (CN), smartphones (CN.) From that list, China leads eighteen, the US leads eleven, the EU leads two, and the EU and US are tied for two. And China is closing in fast on chipmaking. When China takes that crown, what will the EU have left?
The goal of net energy exporter assumes that energy produced at one time can be exchange for energy produced at an other time for the same price, and that assumption has not been true in Europe for decades. You can be a net energy exporter and still be dependent energy imports for more than 50% of the energy a country consumes, as has been demonstrated by Denmark.
I will happily trade 10 unit of energy for just a single unit of energy, assuming I get to decide when I give the 10 units and when I can demand the 1 unit. A lot of profit in the European energy market can be made by such a "bad" deal.
The date when a country energy grid is free from fossil fuels, like coal, is when the grid has no longer any demand during the year for producing or importing energy produced by fossil fuels.
I don't know if I buy this argument. If the US sends oil to another country, which burns it for energy, produces a finished good and exports that back to the US, then the CO2 released isn't accounted for in production-based numbers. But it seems to me like it isn't really properly accounted for in the consumption-based numbers that Noah is holding up, because those are effectively giving the US a credit for exporting the oil in the first place that offsets the imported good. As he says, the US's exports are carbon-intensive and that largely explains the difference being so small.
Noah also tries to refute the perception that manufacturing is in decline in the US, but he doesn't adjust per-capita and doesn't account for the obvious fact that major US exports are looking more and more like raw materials and less like finished goods, while imports are the other way around. Aircraft and ICs used to compete for top spot on the US export list. Since 2008 it's petroleum and oil.
It's even more nuanced than that because the United States is made up of many different states, with many different energy policies. Ireland would most closely equate to the state of Massachusetts by population and economic size, and Massachusetts shut down its last coal plant almost a decade ago.
europes coal powerplants are in china, its polution is in china, the products of china are in europe and the producers from china live in europe and the us. China even offers greenwashing as a service, so people can buy for green notes a green consciousness.
> europes coal powerplants are in china, its polution is in china, the products of china are in europe and the producers from china live in europe and the us.
This is generally overstated. Emissions imported or exported via trade are significantly smaller than domestic emissions for almost every country. In the EU vs China case, accounting for imported/exported emissions basically changes which of the two is doing better, but emission levels are pretty close to begin with (US is already doing significantly worse than China either way).
For China, we are talking about ~1 ton/person/year from trade (in favor of China), while local emissions are at ~8 tons/person/year [1].
You make a valid point, but looking at the actual numbers it turns out that this makes (surprisingly) little difference.
This is what matters. The whole thing is an exercise in greenwashing. It doesn't matter if you stop burning coal in your own country, if the energy you import is also made by burning oil and gas.
The whole conversation about clean energy is polluted by the complete misunderstanding of the general population of how energy demands are balanced. Saying you're replacing coal and gas with wind is just nonsense. It's one solution to a bigger problem. The big problem is how to balance your grid across peaks and troughs and that requires a diverse set of clean energy solutions, with wind being one small part of it.
Great to see, hopefully they can end turf burning too. (For those unaware it's basically where you take a wetland habitat that's also an amazing carbon store, cut it in to chunks, dry it out, and burn it for a very dirty heat source)
It will virtually end when it is no longer economically advantageous. In my mother's hometown in Mayo, most home heat was solid fuel, and it's gradually turning to electric heat pumps. The other alternative, heating oil, is very expensive and not renewable, but also used a lot. I think the turf is starting to run out because the use of it has gone way down. Either that or fewer homes have a legacy parcel of bog.
Unfortunately I think that's going to be very, very hard to sell to many people here in rural Ireland (Roscommon in my case). I would really love to see people stop burning turf but it's such a strong cultural thing that in some parts you'd be ostracised for even thinking the thought.
I've personally spoken to people (who are otherwise quite environmentally aware) who suggest they'd never vote for the Green Party because they'd take their turf away. It's a tough sell.
How much impact does it realistically have on climate change? I would expect it to be relatively small compared to things like owning a car?
In a perfect world we would want to reduce emissions as much as possible in every facet of life, but in the real world I think we should pick battles that have the biggest impact.
I think the domestic heating use is a drop in the bucket compared to commercial extraction of peat for export, or historical use for electricity generation.
I've only so many shits to give, and people heating their homes doesn't rank.
People heating their homes can be very sigificant. In the UK ~15% of all its territorial GHGs come from heating with gas: actual CO2 from the home boiler flues.
CO2 from small amounts of rural home heating is probably not the big thing to be worried about, especially if local recent biomass, eg wood from forest management. But there are still nasties (PMs, biodiversity losses, etc) to be considered and that should be dealt with in due course.
On cold mornings you can see the wood smoke hanging over the town of Taos New Mexico. It's easy to see even a little bit of haze in the otherwise crystal clear air. Taos is in general a very environmentally conscious place. The KTAO radio station has been solar powered since the early 1990s. It also has a significant population of low wage tourism industry workers.
If you use Renewable Energy Sources, it may happen there will be no wind or no sun. So you need some auxiliary source of energy. If you want it at hand, this must be something with fast cold start. So black/brown coal power plan will not help you, similarly nuclear. You need to burn either gas or "biomass", that is wood/turf, etc. Those power plants have about 1h cold start.
Hence, in order to have RES you need to emit CO2. Deal with this. The other option, and UK goes that way, is to purchase electricity when it is lacking, paying spot prices, that's why they have such a big electricity bills, economy is down, people get mad and vote psychos.
The solution is dead simple, as France example shows. Simply use nuclear power plants and does not bother with RES, as it does not make any sense now.
Maybe, when we have technology to store efficiently electricity at scale, we can start using RES. But we just do not have that.
The end result now is that electricity in Europe is the most expensive on the World, so all manufacturing is moved to Asia, who does not bother with climate that much, that's why, despite all Europe efforts, overall CO2 emission keeps growing.
> If you use Renewable Energy Sources, it may happen there will be no wind or no sun
I still find it staggering that people feel like this is something that needs to be said as if it’s surprising or a novel idea. Do you really believe smart people haven’t been working through these challenges for decades?
Yet somehow we don't need a similar reminder for the possibility of fossil fuel power plants running out of fuel after a short time if not regularly restocked. Why is it worth bringing up one, but not the other?
> If you use Renewable Energy Sources, it may happen there will be no wind or no sun
If you have to import fuel, it may happen that no ships can get through. Or the fuel becomes too expensive to buy because of war, natural disasters, or market forces. Ain't nobody turning off the sun or wind.
> Maybe, when we have technology to store efficiently electricity at scale
Battery storage that works at grid-scale is a fairly recent technological innovation. It's good that humanity figured out this technological innovation, and demand for better battery technology from the smartphone and electric car revolutions had a lot to do with it. But battery storage is still expensive and relatively-new physical infrastructure that takes time and expense to deploy at scale, and it's still in the process of happening now.
> If you use Renewable Energy Sources, it may happen there will be no wind or no sun.
Yes, but this rarely happens, so any potential solution should be designed around it being idle 99% of the time.
> Those power plants have about 1h cold start.
Gas turbines can spin up significantly faster. However, the weather is quite predictable, so it is unlikely that this will be needed. Besides, battery storage is the perfect solution as an ultra-fast ramp-up holdover source until the turbines are at 100%.
> Hence, in order to have RES you need to emit CO2.
Or you equip the handful of gas turbines you use to make up for that 1% gap in renewables with carbon capture? It's not ideal, but it is very much doable.
> Simply use nuclear power plants and do not bother with RES
... and have your electricity be even more expensive?
Pumped storage hydro is extremely cheap and efficient and has been around for more than a century. LiFePo4 batteries are now cheap enough that they're a cost-competitive alternative. Flywheel storage plugs the inertia gap nicely.
The tech exists - it's mostly just a matter of political will. The economics already justify it. People are making considerable money by starting up BESSs (Battery Energy Storage Systems) and doing time arbitrage on energy.
cf. Iberia, who recently learned that effective storage and intertial pick-up is integral to a stable and efficient power network, and are now spending heavily on both.
It's a pipedream. Yes it's cheap and efficient, but it requires the geography and the will to destroy a local ecosystem.
BESS is what will ultimately win. It's pretty energy dense and it can be deployed on pretty much any junk land location. The only fight you'll have is with the neighbors who don't like it.
My power company, Idaho power, is deploying a 200MWh BESS on a slice of land they've owned for decades near one of their substations. The hardest part has been the permitting (which is now done).
To cover Europe's need you only need to build 70 1.5 GW hydroelectric stations at a cost of $92 billion (in reality much higher) while greatly damaging ecology in large areas.
This source also offers an option of $1 Trillion USD to do it with battery storage.
All of Europe. $1 Trillion USD. Oh, and that figure has already fallen by 1/3rd in reality and the article claims it should drop by half again.
And that seems to be assuming you only have wind power as input. The long lull periods that drive the high storage requirements are, as that article claims, caused by large high pressure air masses. High pressure systems like that often come with clear skies! Indeed, go look at weather history for that same 2015 period and you see that the skies were calm and clear, and precipitation was about half the "normal" amount for that time of year. While there is perfect correlation between a windless day and a night without sunlight, battery to get you through the night is trivial and solved far more cheaply than this article seems to understand. Enough battery to maintain 24 hour output for a solar farm is cheap enough to compete with fossil fuels. Long term, wind and solar do not correlate, so it's very rare to have long lulls in both at the same time.
So this article is leaving out important details and also is way more pessimistic than even it admits is true.
That also ignores that even in the "lulls", wind never seems to go to zero, so even in lulls, you can always just have more wind. Building 10x as much wind as you need is not as feasible as building 10x as much solar as you need though IMO.
Oh, and a very very very important fact: Renewable generation is almost entirely a one time cost, or one time every 30ish years on average. OPEX per kilowatt hour is dramatically lower than fossil fuels. In fact, today Europe imports 10 million barrels of crude oil a day, and at $100 a barrel (a number which will rise quite a bit in the coming months), Europe spends $1 Trillion every few years.
Europe's current energy spend is to buy an entire continent's worth of energy storage and just turn it into CO2 every few years. Every single day of crude oil import, Europe could instead pay for one of the Coire Glas model plants this article is doing the math with.
Storage is beyond feasible and will reduce energy costs.
Note: This article is about making wind energy constant over month long time scales, not about building enough storage to power Europe durably, so that explains some of it's misses, but also doesn't really explain much. The 2.1 TWh of storage it suggest would be enough to power all of Europe for 8 hours a day.
> this must be something with fast cold start. So black/brown coal power plan will not help you, similarly nuclear.
Nuclear plants provide base load and they are extremely fast at ramping up/lowering production. All modern nuclear plants are capable of changing power output at 3-5% of nameplate capacity per minute: https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2021-12...
You don't shut down power plants. None of the power plants ever do a "fast cold start"
> The end result now is that electricity in Europe is the most expensive on the World, so all manufacturing is moved to Asia
The production moved to Asia due to extremely cheap labor, not due to electricity costs.
5% per minute is not extremely fast. Simple cycle gas turbine (peaker) plants routinely go 0 to 100% in less than 10 minutes. Nuclear plants can only hit 5% per minute in the 50 to 100% interval (per your own source).
And all of this is confused by the way the nuclear industry uses the term "load following". You'd think it means "changing the power output from moment to moment to match electricity demand" but for nuclear plants it means "changing from one pre-planned constant level to another pre-planned constant level, up to four times per day".[0] There are only three[1] sources of electricity that can be ramped freely enough to exactly match demand: hydro, simple-cycle gas turbines and batteries. All electrical supplies will need some of those three mixed in. Which is why France is still 10% hydro and 10% natural gas in their electricity supply.
0: Some of the most modern Russian plants can move to +-20% of their current target at 10% per minute, but "the number of such very fast
power variations is limited, and they are mainly reserved for emergency situations." per your source.
1: OK, there are some obsolete ways too, like diesel generators. At least obsolete at the scale of the electricity grid.
> You'd think it means "changing the power output from moment to moment to match electricity demand" but for nuclear plants it means "changing from one pre-planned constant level to another pre-planned constant level, up to four times per day"
Which is clearly invalidated by the very source I provided, and which you then somehow quote back at me.
> "the number of such very fast power variations is limited, and they are mainly reserved for emergency situations." per your source.
Imagine if you didn't omit the full quote/context:
--- start quote ---
Also, AES-2006 is capable of fast power modulations with ramps of up to 5% Pr per second (in the interval of ±10% Pr), or power drops of 20% Pr per minute in the interval of 50-100% of the rated power. However, the number of such very fast power variations is limited, and they are mainly reserved for emergency situations.
--- end quote ---
Oh look. What's limited is an actual emergency ramp up of 5% per second or power drops of 20% per minute.
Which is literally an emergency that is not needed in a power grid.
For the foreseeable future, building enough nuclear for peak capacity is exceedingly expensive.
> None of the power plants ever do a "fast cold start"
Somewhere in each grid you will have “black start” capacity contracts, dunno if nuclear can fills this role (or if grids exclude nukes for one reason or another).
Plenty of peaker plants built with the intention of running double digit hours per year and therefore the tradeoff supports being largely “off” in between those calls. Batteries might fill that gap.
> Nuclear plants provide base load and they are extremely fast at ramping up/lowering production
The obvious counterexample is Chernobyl, where a big contributor was the fact that they were unable to scale it down & back up as desired. Yes, nuclear reactors can scale down rapidly - but you have to wait several hours until it can scale back up!
Besides, the linked paper only covers load-following in a traditional grid (swinging between 60% and 100% once a day) and barely touches on the economic effects. The situation is going to look drastically different for a renewables-first grid, where additional sources are needed for at most a few hours a day, for a few months per year.
> You don't shut down power plants. None of the power plants ever do a "fast cold start"
The answer is you don't scale nuclear up or down, it's a silly waste of time and effort to even think about it. The fuel costs are effectively a rounding error, so running at 100% 24x7 is the only way to ever think about how nuclear should operate.
If you are going to curtail, you curtail other sources including solar and wind.
Nuclear fits quite well for the baseload you need. It's more expensive, but if you are going to need X capacity 24x7 and build nuclear, you simply build enough to provide just that plus perhaps a few extra for redundancy when another one goes offline. Then use gas peakers for the "oh shit" days difference between what nuclear is providing and solar was expected to but could not.
I don't understand the fascination folks have about nuclear not being able to following the grid. They don't need to, since they only ever remotely make sense when operated 24x7 at 100%. If you always have 1TW of grid usage every night during your lowest usage period - build that much nuclear as your starting point and figure out the rest from there. Nuclear's share of the total mix should be a straight line on a graph outside of plant shutdowns for maintenance.
You mean the obsolete design that is not used even in old reactors, not to say of modern designs?
Quote:
--- start quote ---
The minimum requirements for the manoeuvrability capabilities of modern reactors are defined by the utilities requirements that are based on the requirements of the grid operators. For example, according to the current version of the European Utilities Requirements (EUR) the NPP must at least be capable of daily load cycling operation between 50% and 100 % of its rated power Pr, with a rate of change of electric output of 3-5% of Pr per minute.
--- end quote ---
> The situation is going to look drastically different for a renewables-first grid, where additional sources are needed for at most a few hours a day, for a few months per year.
There's a declaration that a 915 MW power-plant was removed from the grid, and moved to emergency status only.
However, every other number in the piece is mentioned as some multiple of Wh's (GWh typically). That makes it very hard to tell what proportion of capacity was removed from the system as a proportion of the total generating capacity. I think the writer might have served us better with the use of some helpful percentage comparisons.
AIUI it’s barely been operating for about a decade. Even before it closed (nearly a year ago; this is an old article), most days the eirgrid dashboard showed little or no coal in the mix.
Just last week they were talking about the future of Irelands energy generation, and the pressure between now and 2028 from data centers and EVs. Reopening moneypoint as a backup has been discussed. It's been kept as a oil fired backup station, but given the current surge in oil prices I could see it turning to coal again.
I really hope they just turn heavily toward renewables. We have enough offshore wind in Ireland to power most of the world, if we could just build enough turbines and harness it. We could become a net exporter of green power
Our goal shouldn’t be to be coal free. Our goal should be to be 100% renewable.
If we set up our goals in terms of what we don’t want, we end up in the situation we are right now: high energy costs, very dependent on energy imports and a high risk of loosing our industry
No, our goal is to reduce CO2 emissions as quickly as possible.
Shutting down coal plants is a quick and easy win, as pretty much every possible replacement is less polluting. It might even make sense to replace them with gas turbines: base load today, peaker plant tomorrow, emergency source later on.
Reducing is frivolous today. We will break through the tipping point in 2030. This will be the coolest century this millennium. There's no way to stop it. We needed to shut down emissions years ago. The only thing we can do proactively is invest in moon-shot tech such as fusion and ocean wave generation and wait for the planet to recover.
> This will be the coolest century this millennium.
While you are making predictions 975 years out, could we see your projected graph of human population? Time estimate for establishment of a permanent extraterrestrial colony?
I am not sure it's a matter of how you frame the issue, to be honest, although I have seen this argument used quite a lot.
100% renewables is the exact opposite of "100% non-renewables" and that's including also oil, gas, etc. So "coal" is only a part of the 100% non renewables, but it seems your goal is to get rid of all the non renewables.
And here the question is: why would you want a single goal? Why 100% renewable?
What drives us should be: save where it makes sense, don't where it doesn't. Iterate every 10 years and recheck.
All these single radical goals are literally killing our economy and society. And I am not just talking about coal free or renewable.
Even the "let's tear down the windfarms" is dumb because it's radical and non sense.
Or unrelated, even this "we need to digitalize everything" (although given our jobs we would profit the most) can lead to a lot of problems (privacy, security, etc).
I don't know why we have become so radical in the last 20 years.
> And here the question is: why would you want a single goal? Why 100% renewable?
Overlapping goals can coexist on varying time frames.
Setting aside nuclear (technically not "renewable", but also not carbon-based, and very energy dense) the goal is to stop releasing CO2 into the air from energy generation and return to pre-industrial levels.
This is because the surplus of CO2 generated so far has already caused clear and undeniable problems (not all of which are yet fully realized), and continued excess will only make things worse.
> What drives us should be: save where it makes sense, don't where it doesn't. Iterate every 10 years and recheck.
Solar is already economically competitive in many places and is expected to improve further.
Coal is about as dirty as it gets (besides peat and lignite). _Even if you were not reducing CO2 output_, getting rid of coal would be greatly beneficial as you'd reduce COPD and other lung diseases.
> The new analysis for Carbon Brief shows that electricity generation from coal in India fell by 3.0% year-on-year (46 terawatt hours, TWh) and in China by 1.6% (90TWh).
Seem to be on their way. Solar power is cheaper than coal now for some projects. In 10 years coal will be entirely obsolete. Though of course phase out will take longer
1. There are coordination issues that have caused them to overestimate the need for such plants, which have been running at low capacity. There have also been perverse incentives to build plants that weren't needed, in order to placate the relevant stakeholders.
2. Battery storage (including pumped hydro) is being pursued aggressively, specifically (among other things) to address the reliability concerns that motivated the recent new coal plant construction. Government policy, furthermore, is clearly focused on "new energy", i.e. not fossil fuels.
3. Coal power generation in China has been level or declining for a little while now. Generation from new renewable plants is outstripping the overall increase in demand for power. There is a graph titled "New coal power has no predictive value for future coal power generation".
4. Historical, global evidence shows a persistent trend of capacity reduction lagging behind generation reduction. As should be expected. It takes effort (= money) to decommission a power plant, and an inactive (or less-active) one is a safety net. "In most cases, what ultimately stopped new coal power projects in those countries was not a formal ban, but the market reality.... In China, the same market signals are emerging: clean energy is now meeting all incremental demand and coal power generation has, as a result, started to decline."
5. As a share of total power generation, coal power in China has dropped substantially (from nearly 3/4 to scarcely half) over the last decade or so. In absolute terms, it is likely near or even past the peak.
6. The article concludes: "While China’s coal power construction boom looks, at first glance, like a resurgence,it currently appears more likely to be the final surge before a long downturn. The expansion has added friction and complexity to China’s energy transition, but it has not reversed it."
You asked:
> So are China, generally shifting away from coal?
Your own source clearly argues that they are, in fact, shifting away from coal. Presenting an article that refutes you as if it supported you, while employing this style of repeated "pointed" questions, is disingenuous and obnoxious.
There's a lot of misinformation and misunderstanding of the global energy supply presented around me nowadays. I would urge anyone to stop what they're doing and read "Clearing the Air" [1]. It's completely reshaped my understanding of this problem, and I am far more optimistic after reading it.
It addresses key questions such as "What about China?" and "Can we stop it?"
Ireland is a net energy importer who imports electricity from Great Britain. She, in turn, often imports from nations including France, Holland, and Denmark, who use coal power.
As such, it's not really the whole story to call Ireland, "coal-free". It's the same as America outsourcing heavy manufacturing or chemicals to China and claiming environmental victory. It's true in a narrow construction of the concept; it does reduce the burden on one's own country. It is false in the sense of one's contribution to the global commons and externalizes those externalities previously more internalized. It is, in other words, a shell game. Ireland's dependence on imported energy continues to rise and the number continues to tick up on the books of other nations and down on hers, with her people paying the "guilt premium" associated with this accounting trick. They're not exactly dirty grids, but the fact remains, Ireland still relies to some extent on coal.
Also note that, though she is building OCGTs and fast CCGTs elsewhere, she converted Moneypoint not to gas but to heavy fuel oil. HFO is quite dirty stuff, only a dozen or so per cent cleaner than the coal it replaces per Ireland's own EIS. This is likely influenced by the fact that the plant was specced to burn some of the cleaner thermal coal on the market, largely from Glencore's Cerrejon mine, with pretty low sulfur and ash relative to others. So, the delta from relatively clean coal (excuse the expression) to some of the dirtiest oil; large boilers like that are likely burning No. 5 or 6, aka bunker B or C in marine. Not sure if you've ever seen (or smelled) this stuff but it's the next thing from tar.
Ireland could instead have chosen to pull in gas from the North Sea and reduced the emissions of Moneypoint by not twelve but fifty to sixty per cent with modern CCGTs. Even older, more readily-available OCGTs would give thirty to forty per cent. This is ~250mmcf, i.e. probably a 24" spur line. Though this likely necessitates a few hundred km of loop for the ring main to the west, it's less than a year's work with a competent American crew.
Instead, she chose a paltry twelve per cent a few years earlier; when the other gas peaker capacity is installed, cooling infra and existing thermal plant talent base while paying to reconstitute all those on the other side of the island.
None of this is to say Ireland's work on decarbonizing her grid isn't real, but "coal-free" rather tends to obscure the present state of things; it is generally understood to make a strong, binary truth claim that isn't subject to "mostly" and implies one is no longer dependent on coal. It therefore demands consideration of electricity's fungibility in a grid.
Ireland is building the Celtic Interconnector with France next, will import a lot of her electricity from there which predominately uses nuclear power to generate her electricity. I fear you're making perfect the enemy of better and genuine progress.
I'm not the enemy of this progress at all and think it's a good thing. Same goes for the Celtic Interconnecter, though. My point is basically a) "coal-free" is misleading and this progress can be framed in other ways, and b) Ireland would have been better-served in terms of cost and environment to rely on even OCGTs than HFO.
Ireland imports less than 10% of it's electricity from the UK. The UK _already_ decommissioned it's coal-based eletricity production. The UK imports roughly 14% of it's electricity, and most of those imports are from nuclear and hydro-electric power.
No, it isn't. Power in a grid is fungible so grids operate based off consumption-based accounting. Britain continues to import at times from countries still burning coal. As such, Ireland is not free of coal dependence. It's really that simple. It is accurate for Ireland to say she no longer directly burns coal, no longer operates coal power, but the common understanding of "coal-free" is, "we are no longer directly dependent on coal for our lights to turn on." That simply isn't the case.
The way to think about this is, "If the grid had zero reserves and coal cut off, who could POSSIBLY go down?" You may figure this is constructed, but in a few days' dunkelflaute, Ireland needs her interconnects. Wind is then possibly low across much of Europe, meaning Holland and Germany ramp dispatchable capacity, including German lignite.
I saw nobody making those arguments. Most people were thinking that Ireland doesn't burn coal anymore. People who think or care about this stuff know that interconnects exist.
Ireland is not industrialised in a similar way to other EU countries like Germany or Italy which has lots of heavy manufacturing. Irish industry is mostly composed of US pharmaceuticals and data centres occupying much of the energy demand. There is a bauxite facility in limerick which does come to mind but that sort of thing isn't common in Ireland.
A lot of these plants were built in the 70s-90s and were expected to run 40–50 years. Instead many are shutting early because renewables plus carbon pricing have simply made them uneconomical
Dirty power generation, and dirty toxic hazardous industry in general, discriminate against the poor and minorities. That carries an enormous social cost that goes uncounted in discussions like the ones on this thread.
Nuclear discriminates against capitalism. The cost makes the choice of nuclear irrational. The inability to insure nuclear in the private market makes it a travesty of free markets.
The top comment currently on this post is talking about the cost impacts being transferred to the poor and middle class with lots of discussion. I think people are well aware of and discuss the social impacts.
They discuss "social impacts" from the point of view that dirtier power is cheaper, supposedly, hypothetically, net of externalities, while ignoring the cost dirty power inflicts on the people living near the dirty power generation.
Definitely a step in the right direction, but believe it or not-- I overheard a customer in Aldi asking for coal only last week! I couldn't believe it, the staff member didn't know where to send them
They'd be better off with (and are building out) offshore and onshore wind. If you've ever been to the west coast of Ireland you'll know they've got almost unlimited wind energy. The country is targeting 5GW of capacity by 2030 and 37GW in the distant future[1].
If only they could harness the power of rain, Ireland would truly be an energy superpower.
> If only they could harness the power of rain, Ireland would truly be an energy superpower.
I know this is in jest, but that's basically "dam up some valley rivers and put a hydroelectric generator on the end", and unfortunately Ireland isn't so good for that. (It's not just the physical geology, it's also all the people living in the places you'd flood).
Hydro as a battery is easier and works in far more locations, but that's not harnessing the power *of rain*.
But yes, Ireland and the UK have an absolutely huge wind power resource available around them, IIRC enough to supply all of Europe if the grid connections were there to export it all.
There has been a lot of proposals to dam up massive unpopulated sea-facing valleys in Mayo and Donegal and use pumped hydro with seawater. Was a bit topic 15 years ago, but never happened. All that happened was the silvermines pump hydro plant that seems behind schedule.
Ireland briefly had the biggest hydroelectric dam in the world until the Hoover dam was built… but that was before electricity production really took off. Ireland doesn’t really have the geography for dams, the hills and rivers are far too small.
Onshore wind in England was de-facto but not de-jure banned by the Tories in 2018, due to a footnote inserted in their National Planning Policy Framework. Labour removed this footnote in 2024, immediately after winning the election. [0]
Offshore wind was never affected, nor onshore wind in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland.
Well, Tories would argue that you can't get the really big turbines onshore that you can offshore, so it doesn't really matter. Tiddly little turbines don't generate that much, and why spend lots of money on the planning process and fighting NIMBYs when you can generate it offshore?
However, it does matter, when looked at in whole with the need for capacity in the National Grid. A pile of turbines across SE England would have really helped, because a lot of the offshore wind and Scottish wind power has to be dumped, and gas generators fired up instead, due to lack of grid capacity to distribute that power across the country.
We should, of course, have completed upgrades to the grid by now, but they're late.
The 'sell electricity to Ireland' bit here is doing an awful lot of work. It's more complicated than that.
For those who don't know, Ireland operates an all-island grid, and EirGrid (the grid operator for the Republic) owns SONI (the grid operator for Northern Ireland). That means that 'UK' and 'Ireland' in this has a large Northern Ireland shaped lump of ambiguity that statement.
It shouldn't be that complicated. The UK sells electricity to Ireland (and vice-versa?) in the same way that Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Denmark and Norway sell electricity to the UK, and vice-versa.
Don't tell me EirGrid's EWIC that comes onshore at Dublin and Greenlink at County Wexford are an "NI-shaped lump". They are sources of electricity for the whole island, when it's needed, just like the UK's interconnects with the continent.
Tories during 2015-2023 made construction of new onshore wind farms all but impossible (removed subsidies and made planning permissions very difficult). I would assume Labor could reverse these polices but haven't seen anything in news about this.
In 2000, coal was about 20% of the energy mix, gas another 20%, oil about 50%. Wind was 0%. In 2024 coal was about 2%, gas still 20%, oil still 50%, but wind grew to about 15%. It seems that wind actually replaced coal. It is not only logical, but good, that wind first replaced coal (dirtiest), and maybe from now on is will start to replace oil. Only after many decades, or maybe never, gas will be replaced.
Primary energy compared to electricity as energy. The first adds energy used in driving, chemical industry etc. the second is just the amount of electricity generated.
Still, in the second figure of your link, you can see how gas is more or less stable since the start in 2005, and coal + peat is being slowly replaced almost 1:1 by renewables, mainly wind as hydro is stable and solar is marginal in Ireland.
crude oil and petroleum products (37.7%)
natural gas (20.4%)
renewable energy (19.5%)
solid fuels (10.6%)
nuclear energy (11.8%)
(2023 numbers)
So natural gas was just barely more than renewables in 2023, but according to the source below the line was crossed in 2025 and renewables now provide more than all fossil fuels put together:
For those following along at home, it appears enir is (edit: as well as using EU wide data, not Irish data..) including non-electricity generation, or non-grid, energy use. Grid stats available here https://www.seai.ie/data-and-insights/seai-statistics/electr...
Ireland has essentially no working oil power generation capacity these days (I think the only ones are a couple of small diesel units on islands, which are not even connected to the national grid). Moneypoint was replaced with some combo of wind, gas and imports.
(Moneypoint was actually built originally due to Ireland's over dependence at the time on oil for power generation; after the oil crisis, initially ESB attempted to build a nuclear plant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnsore_Point#Cancelled_nucle...), but it was such a political minefield that it was canceled, leading to Moneypoint.)
I think this is very strategically stupid decision (or crime committed by high management). Those should be preserved and be ready for use in case things go south which is not inconceivable judging by what is happening around
Am am not against "saving planet" etc. Just make sure you still have a way to survive if high tech fails. Same as with let's abolish all cash without thinking what a nightmare it can / will cause one day
From the article: the Moneypoint plant will continue to serve a limited backup role, burning heavy fuel oil under emergency instruction from Ireland’s transmission system operator EirGrid until 2029.
I understand that American shale gas (the largest fraction of LNG imports to the EU) is by certain measures as polluting as coal. If correct, Europe needs to reconsider if the price (and political) volatility is really worth it.
Highest[1] base electricity price in the EU, some of the worst conditions for solar generation, a war in Iran, and now they've closed the coal plant. Great. Guess I'll just go bankrupt.
Edit: instead of downvoting my post, feel free to pay my electric bill, lol
Not everyone is supposed to read every single news. There will always be someone who didn't see it, but that is not my point.
It would feel weird to see this as a headline on a newspaper or on TV today, but maybe that is just me and people like to read new that are from last year.
This happened almost a year ago. Ireland has no normal oil generation capacity (ironically moneypoint has been retained as an emergency-only oil burning plant til 2030, but it would generally only be used in this capacity as an emergency measure when gas plants unexpectedly go down).
China is building solar panels at a record pace, and building wind turbines at a record pace, and building nuclear power plants at a record pace. Meanwhile, the construction rate of coal plants has been dropping over the last decade and a half.
They build new coal plants as a backup, or to replace existing older plants. But they're very clearly not using them more than they already were. They burn coal because they have coal, just like the US burns gas because the fracking boom made gas cheap.
I think they'll follow China's lead soon. The economics are inevitable. Ember projects India will be at 42% renewable electricity by 2030, up from 10% today. This is obviously staggering renewables growth in a poor country.
Both India and China lack oil. Reducing fossil fuel usage is a national security issue for them. They're also poorer. As solar and wind become the cheapest sources of electricity, thanks mostly to China, they're going to rapidly transition. No dumb political games.
Unclear to me why you've been downvoted here. The data clearly shows that China is taking more serious action on this issue than any other developed or developing economy.
I didn't downvote (as the information is correct and relevant) but I flagged. Accusing others up front of lying, or of being motivated by various political outgroup boogeymen, is not on.
China is not - Chinas coal consumption is stagnating with about zero growth from 2024 to 2025.
China is far more serious than the EU about the green transition. Despite being poorer than the poorest EU country they are dominating renewable deployment.
I think that attitude is poorly informed whataboutism.
Irish man here - Over the last few years, we've graduated from providing cheap energy to now importing most of our energy. We've seen huge energy price increases as a result. We're seeing more and more cost-of-living protests, the war now means more will suffer with fuel prices and we're still going ahead with closing down energy suppliers (this is a 2025 article but the point still stands).
To anyone praising these stupid, politically incentivised initiatives - congratulations to us on making the poor and middle-classes poorer.
But it's all good - we're saving the world I guess. The poor folks can sort themselves out.
The actual causes of electricity cost rises in Ireland being higher than Europe are:
Lower population density on a grid without good connections to neighbours.
Previous underinvestment in network infrastructure.
Gas price rises combined with Ireland having less renewables that the EU average (middle of the pack for electricity, 3rd from bottom on total energy).
Maybe saving the world a bit harder would have helped keep prices down. It's certain that building more renewables now is the likeliest path to cheaper electricity.
A report supporting those claims: https://www.nerinstitute.net/sites/default/files/research/89...
> The actual causes of electricity cost rises in Ireland being higher than Europe are
Wrong comparison. Most of Europe has way too high electricity prices.
It seems logical that ending the use of existing coal energy infrastructure puts upward pressure on prices. Coal is cheap, abundant, energy dense.
Yes, burning coal causes lots of problems and I support ending it's use, but this is besides the point.
> Coal is cheap, abundant, energy dense.
Coal is neither cheap nor abundant in Ireland.
> Coal is neither cheap nor abundant in Ireland.
But it is abundant in Russia, Ukraine, Germany, and Poland. Also, there is nuclear power in France.
However, Russia and Ukraine are at war. Germany is willing to go green and destroy itself. EU hates Poland and other east European countries. And EU and the rest of the world can't disassociate nuclear power with weapons.
So I guess EU can enjoy their limited and expensive green energy.
Coal also isn’t really energy dense since so much of the energy is wasted when converting to electricity
It is still one of the densest sources. It's just not as dense as it naively seems.
This. Fossil fuels are not cheap in Ireland, I think we only produce a small quantity of natural gas, everything else is imported. Ireland should be running towards renewables, we have no indigenous fossil fuels industry to lose and every watt we generate from renewables is money that stays in Ireland. We should be focused on reducing nimbyism and building out renewables.
does this renewable policy of wind farms etc also extend to the rain forest being cut down for balsawood? or the landfilles the massive chunks of fiberglass coated wings then get put into?
I guess we need a new planet when we're done filling it with junk and have depleted all the rain forest etc
> Most Europe has way too high electricity prices.
Way to high compared to what? Some countries do not even have a problem with prices but with capacity (Netherlands). They would be willing to pay but they do not have the grid to deliver where the thing is needed, and it's hard to build new grids in high density areas.
> It seems logical that ending the use of existing coal energy infrastructure lead to an increase of prises.
But doesn't this depend a lot on planning and investing in alternatives rather the just closing or not the coal? Sure, if you just close one source and leave everything else untouched prices will increase, but doesn't sound like the smartest approach overall...
Way to high compared to actual cost. Almost half of fuel and electricity costs in Germany is tax.
If it's due to tax it can't be used to advocate the pros or cons of market arrangements, since we don't know what the market would be doing in the absence of the tax.
> It seems logical that ending the use of existing coal energy infrastructure puts upward pressure on prices
Only if you externalize environmental costs. The point is that coal is actually really expensive. The only real argument is how fast the implicit subsidy on these externalized costs should be removed. The world has had decades to slowly remove these subsidies and failed to do so. The impacts caused by these externalized factors are starting to stack up and so should the prices.
> Coal is cheap, abundant, energy dense.
Nuclear defeats coal in all of these aspects, aside from the high upfront cost.
Upfront costs... then running costs (in the UK at least, it has to command a premium over other energy prices, to be profitable)... afterwards costs (in the UK no private company is on the hook for decommissioning their nuclear plants, the population will pick up that cost through taxes)...
But sure, nuclear is cheap if you ignore all those things.
We're already ignoring them all for coal plants, why not?
Which to we ignore for coal? Cost to build a new plant? Cost to run? The decommissioning costs? (Yes we ignore the externalities, and no I don't think we should burn coal. My point is Nuclear has yet to pay its way anywhere in the world, without heavy heavy govt support - far exceeding that given to renewables)
Some figures on running costs: Coal costs about £62 per MWh - (£31 for the coal and £31 for the CO2 premium we already charge the energy producers).
As a fossil fuel comparison, Gas costs about £114 per MWh.
Nuclear - Hinkley C will cost about £128 per MWh - but likely to be even higher when it comes online. And we will be on the hook for this price as long as it runs, no matter how cheap renewables are.
>Which to we ignore for coal? Cost to build a new plant? Cost to run? The decommissioning costs? (Yes we ignore the externalities, and no I don't think we should burn coal. My point is Nuclear has yet to pay its way anywhere in the world, without heavy heavy govt support - far exceeding that given to renewables)
Yes, all three. Building a nuke plant without the additional concern for outcome that we put on nuke would be relatively inexpensive. It's just concrete, pumps, and a turbine. It's a ismilar level of complexity to a coal plant. Same with running cost, same with decommissioning costs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly...
Suppose we designed, operated, and budgeted every coal plant to make accidents like this a statistical impossibility. Not very unlikely, that's not the standard we hold nuke to. An impossiblity. Imagine what that would cost.
If you don't count the externalities, sure. Healthcare is a cost too. We need more holistic accounting, the financialising of everything into a tidy but ultimately false P&L column is literally killing us.
> Coal is cheap
Only if you ignore all externalities including:
- environmental damage from mining (yes this exists for renewables too)
- global warming
- pollution on city infrastructure
- pollution on health
- the sunk costs causing higher transition costs when inevitably you transfer to renewables anyways.
> Only if you ignore all externalities
Do not discount how easy that is to do. Your list is of costs not to any bottom line of a company with bean counters. Those external costs are out side the scope of their concerns. Your list of concerns would be something for C-suite types, but the pressure of stock prices again make the external costs easy to set aside.
Sure, but as a consumer you can also care about these things.
Coal is teetering on the edge of economic viability. In the US, our coal-obsessed administration is now at the point of forcing coal power plants to remain operational against the wishes of their owners who want to shut them down as they’re no longer profitable.
If Israel can build an electrical grid connection to Greece then Ireland should have no problem building good connections with France and the UK.
They do have 3 already and they're building 3 more:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_high-voltage_transmiss...
The new one going to France will probably have the most impact initially, the French love to sell their Nuke's surplus capacity. The new British ones by the time they're finished should have access to British's big wind energy generation, much of which will be online at that point.
| more and more cost-of-living protests
They must have been real quiet. Most the protests are related to how expensive it has become to rent / buy in this country.
Ireland has encouraged and allowed a huge number of data centers to be setup here and been very slow to implement legislation for other green forms of energy generation. We don't need dirty forms of energy production here like coal and peat just to make energy cheap. Relying on Oil and Gas leaves us hugely at the whims of the international markets.
| now importing most of our energy
14.0% of its electricity in 2024 according to https://www.seai.ie/data-and-insights/seai-statistics/key-pu...
> Ireland has encouraged and allowed a huge number of data centers to be setup here and been very slow to implement legislation for other green forms of energy generation. We don't need dirty forms of energy production here like coal and peat just to make energy cheap. Relying on Oil and Gas leaves us hugely at the whims of the international markets.
It's grid capacity more than anything which is the issue, and (like many other Irish issues) this is downstream of failures in our planning and permitting process.
Agreed. As I said in another comment it is a policy decision to rely on market forces while making little effort to reform the planning process. We should be a world leader in wind energy but the planning process holds us back hugely.
Governmens around the world trying to shift blame from gtid caoacity managers (so, themselves) to users because "they just consume too much".
In no other industry are providers ever worried about selling too much.
You always need some backup when the wind does not blow, although in Ireland it blows almost everyday. A deal with the UK (although Milliband has idiotically jumped way too far on the green bandwagon and prevented North Sea drilling) should guarantee that.
Real estate and energy prices are both two sides of the same coin and included in the cost of living...if you aren't aware?
Also, both of these problems are caused by the same thing: NIMBY-ism.
Modern western governments generally hate people new building new things. Whether its a renewable energy project, a fossil fuel plant, a housing development, etc. It's all the same problem.
This attitude is ill informed.
Ireland is richer than it has ever been. Poverty and housing difficulties have nothing to do with reducing emissions.
Ireland partly got rich by being a massive CO2 polluter per capita. Now we are rich it’s only fair we lead in transitioning to renewables. Renewables are cheaper now than most forms of energy production. Grids need investment.
I despair at these short sighted and fairly wrong on the facts views.
> Ireland is richer than it has ever been.
Isn't that more about big tech companies using Ireland as a tax dodge, rather than a sign of average people doing well?
For less-well-off people, energy costs in the UK are a huge issue, they're more than twice what they were pre-Covid. Energy bills are second only to housing costs when it comes to the cost of living crisis. Although grocery price inflation/shrinkflation has been pretty shocking too.
If this stuff is cheaper, why are prices going up?
21% of all energy is now being consumed by data centers with not enough investment in new forms of energy generation.
This is a policy decision by the government. More realistically it is a decision to not proactively do anything and instead rely on market prices to encourage new entrants to the market.
https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-dcmec/dat...
Would any free market proponent like to chime in here? Why hasn’t this occurred?
It's not a free market in Europe since there is vast amount of planning regulations involved etc. If you want to see free markets in action, look at the electricity prices in Texas, where ironically renewables are also the dominant source. https://www.gridstatus.io/live
weird, because wouldnt part of the price for electricity include the network?
Are you telling me that the electricity purchasing is like me purchasing from amazon, but but never charges shipping, or factor it into the products, and then suddenly cant ship because all trucks are used and no money to buy new?
A very fair question and the answer is complicated. Production costs and transmission costs are separate. Also demand changes the market rate. And even if renewables are cheaper to produce in a market usually the highest price regardless of source sets the price. This is to incentivise the cheapest production methods to be invested in.
It’s a massive topic and I encourage everyone to go and dive into it. It’s endlessly fascinating and also one of the really positive stories in the world right now which can help balance your emotions in a sometimes depressing world. At least for me it does.
> This is to incentivise the cheapest production methods to be invested in.
It's also just a rule of economics. The price is set at the cost of the most expensive production necessary to meet demand.
So if solar could fulfill 100% of energy demand, price would be the cost of solar, and any other more expensive generation would either lose money, shut down or idle.
But if we shut down or idle those today we wouldn't have enough electricity, so the price rises until the more expensive plants can stay open and demand is met.
... So then why isn't the solar to replace the more expensive plants getting built?
Because at the moment wind has been the winner in the Irish climate, especially when you look backwards long enough to account for the time scales over which energy buildouts occur. Renewables have grown to 40% of the overall supply, resulting in the most expensive plants (currently coal plants, and before that peat) closing. Solar is entering the market rapidly though, it grew from like 1% to 4% in the last 3 years. So I wouldn’t be surprised to see some gas plants closing in the next few years, given the more expensive options are now already gone
Snarky response deleted.
That rule is a rule of free markets. Electricity is not a free market, so it only partially applies. Texas is closer to a free market, and unsurprisingly it is adopting solar faster than most.
It is not that complicated. When the energy crisis in EU happened a few years ago, it demonstrated clearly that people and industry is willing to pay a years worth of energy bills for a single month to keep lights and machine operating. What this mean is that you could in concept give people free power for 11 months, and then increase electricity prices by 12x for the remaining month, and people would still pay it.
This also demonstrated through most countries in Europe that citizens will vote to have government that fix the energy market. Citizens do not want a free energy market that can raise prices to any degree, and its their tax money that fund grid stability.
This all mean that the cheapest form of producing energy do not result automatically in reduced energy costs for consumers and companies. The product that people pay for is not energy in a pure form, it is energy produced at a given time and given location. Make the energy free but the time and location expensive, and the total cost will still be expensive.
Transmission can help Ireland, but it can also hurt it by linking it to a larger market that can create a even higher demand spikes than exist in the current local grid. If the linked grid has locations which has higher energy costs than Ireland, then Ireland will subsidize those people by linking the markets together. Rules like highest price regardless of source sets the price, and higher amount of transmissions, also tend to result in more companies getting paid to maintain operations and thus more parties getting paid that is not linked to the marginal cost of producing energy.
It's really not. Energy grids are not designed for distributed generation. In my US state, that means billions of infrastructure investment.
The people using carbon to create forcing functions to transition to renewables conveniently forget to mention that. Which sucks, as solar in particular is almost a miracle product, but at this point my delivery charges to get electricity exceed the electricity supply by 10%. 20 years ago, delivery was 30% of supply.
My state, New York, decided it would be smart to turn off the nuclear plant that supplies 20% of NYC electricity, and replace it over a decade with a rube goldberg arrangement of gas, offshore wind, solar, and Canadian imports. The solar is hampered by distribution capacity, gas was slowed down by corruption and is being limited by environmental activists, we elected a president that believes that windmills give you cancer, and of course we are picking fights with Canada now.
Mostly because marginal pricing/merit order.
In a vast over simplfication, the most expensive producer that gets to supply sets the overall price. So even if you supply 99% from wind and hydro, the 1% of power that comes from gas sets the price for 100% of the electricity in the market.
When gas gets more expensive, electricity from gas gets more expensive. The more you have to rely on gas (because you don‘t have batteries, not enough solar, etc), the more you pay high prices.
There are different ways to address these issues. Demand side load management, batteries, etc.
Solar is priced based on gas prices as a financial incentive to encourage producers to build solar. That’s because profiting from the difference between the cost of production for solar and the cost of production from gas is supposed to be the incentive to build solar.
The gas prices went up massively in 2022 with the war in Ukraine, and even though that subsided before the war in Iran a little, the existing supply companies are not going to give back an increase in the price they’ve gained because their prices dropped.
because you start internalizing costs
You would have to normalize against other costs and do a deep dive to really understand. My first question would be whether electricity (commercial and residential) has become relatively more expensive than gas, beer, and other commodities. If it's the same rate then it's more of an overall inflation thing. If electricity really is far and away higher than the rest over time then one would have to look at laws, the grid, demand, and of course supply too.
> You would have to normalize against other costs and do a deep dive to really understand.
The tricky part here is that energy is an input to basically everything. It's a major (through fertiliser) input to food, and then all of transport and stocking of said food which tends to be how energy changes influence downstream inflation. So I think you'd probably need a deeper analysis to tease out these issues.
The price of energy drives inflation. It shouldn't be going up if the claims the new source is cheaper is true (surprise, it's not.)
„Ireland“ is rich because companies have their office there. „The Irish“ are not rich.
Talk about ill informed.
Yes Ireland is rich.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/median-in...
> Ireland partly got rich by being a massive CO2 polluter per capita. Now we are rich it’s only fair we lead in transitioning to renewables. Renewables are cheaper now than most forms of energy production. Grids need investment.
Sorry, what? While I agree with you about reducing emissions, most of our transition from poor to rich(er) was driven by capital light businesses. To be fair, the pharma companies did come here because we refused to regulate spillovers up to EU standards, but that's less than half of the story.
tl;dr loads of golf courses, english speaking population, smart industrial plannng and tax dodging was really how it happened.
None of those things were possible without the fossil fuel based energy underlying everything. Every single wealthy country used energy from fossil fuels to escape poverty. Some to a greater degree than others but that’s the basic reality. Now we have a way out of fossil fuels and we must take it or things will get even worse than they are already going to get anyway. And I did say it was only part of the story, albeit essential.
> Now we are rich it’s only fair we lead in transitioning to renewables
Unfortunately it's not the people/generation who reaped the rewards from cheap energy and polluting who are now being made to feel the pain of the transition.
> This attitude is ill informed.
> Renewables are cheaper now than most forms of energy production. Grids need investment.
> Now we are rich it’s only fair we lead in transitioning to renewables.
> I despair at these short sighted and fairly wrong on the facts views.
The level of arrogance is unmatched while being both factually wrong AND self-contradictory.
Absolute cinema!
> Ireland partly got rich by being a massive CO2 polluter per capita.
This argument that we have to self destruct to have the moral highground just keeps getting repeated, for maybe two decades now.
We, as in the West, got there first because we are luckier/better organised/evil colonialists/whatever, take your pick it doesn't matter.
China DGAF about our self perceived virtuousness, they know windpower and solar are not viable long term, they're just happy to sell us more panels and propellers like any other widget from a factory with a profit margin. Web search how many Chinese coal plants came online in the last six months.
> they know windpower and solar are not viable long term
That’s why they are installing it all over their country at the fastest pace of any country by far? That’s why they probably hit peak oil consumption?
The coal thing is complicated in China. They are replacing many old coal stations, local governments are fearful of being caught short in a cold winter which has happened. Rate of coal consumption increases is slowing. Peak coal may have happened last year.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-why-china-is-still-bu...
Hopefully this new info might help change your views.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_China
>"China is the world's top electricity producer from renewable energy sources. China's renewable energy capacity is growing faster than its fossil fuels and nuclear power capacity.[1] China installed over 373 GW of renewables in 2024, reaching a total installed renewable capacity of 1,878 GW by the end of the year. The country aims to have 80% of its total energy mix come from non-fossil fuel sources by 2060, and achieve a combined 1,200 GW of solar and wind capacity by 2030.[1]
>Although China currently has the world's largest installed capacity of hydro, solar and wind power, its energy needs are so large that some fossil fuel sources are still used."
Seems more renewables came online than non-renewables, perhaps your take is outdated?
With its population and size, China will top production. But their coal plants have been coming up more than every other country combined. It's the percentages, not the absolutes.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-consumption-by-count...
China is the world's top consumer of coal, and accounts for more than 50% of the world's total consumption of coal.
People keep forgetting in all the China-posting that China is a country of 1.4 billion people, approximately 256 times the size of the Irish population, and therefore it's not really surprising when it tops a "top consumption" or "top production" list of any kind.
(second most populous after India)
Alternatively, if all Ireland was a city in China, it would not be in the list of top 50 cities by population.
While it's not surprising that's in the top, it's surprising by how much. ~1/7th of the world population, but ~55% of coal consumption is pretty unbalanced IMO. Of course, the real reason why is that China is the world's factory so the energy consumption is huge as well.
I think the real takeaway here is that the world depends on the industrial production of China, which is powered by coal. We are all using that coal to buy cheap Chinese manufactured goods, and the sooner we come to terms with this the better. Whether a single country uses coal or not is irrelevant for tackling carbon emissions, if we're all basically exporting our carbon emissions to China.
India has bigger population than China.
India is building 41 coal plant, China is building 289. India approved 5 more plants, China approved 405. China is building more coal power than all other countries combined including India.
This thread is crazy. guys just look at numbers first...
Do have a look at the the numbers:
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-coal-power-drops-in-chi...
Seems that you're in violent agreement. China is so large that it tops most metrics you throw at it, even when we consider them contradictory.
They're also closing down coal plants faster than anyone else and actually faster than planned because of the price of solar. Check your facts.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/katharinabuchholz/2026/02/27/ch...
> "This argument that we have to self destruct to have the moral highground"
That's not the argument they made.
> "they know windpower and solar are not viable long term"
Thanks for the nonsensical, unsupported, right-wing talking points, throwaway account. Great contribution.
> "Web search how many Chinese coal plants came online in the last six months."
I web searched and found that "China installed a record 315 GW (AC) of new solar capacity in 2025". The entire UK national grid is currently providing 35GW of power from all sources combined. That's 1/9th of the power China deployed in just solar panels just last year. And China deployed 119GW of wind turbines in the same year as well.
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/01/28/china-adds-315-gw-of-...
I did not expect HN to become this geopolitical.
And are you sure about your claim? Every time I hear anything about China and Solar the core of it is that solar in China is growing more than anywhere else on the planet ( 40% increase in 2025 and creating ~11% of China's energy already )
And that there is no sign of that trend slowing down anytime soon. And why would it. Solar panels are dirt cheap and they have more than enough space for it.
China is also really strong in the battery space, so they have everything they need to ditch oil/coal eventually
They also are building more coal, gas, and nuclear than anyone else at epic yearly increases.
That they have the internal political means to get large infrastructure projects done is laudible - they can actually build transmission lines that make unreliable energy sources like solar and wind feasible. In the US that is effectively impossible due to the NIMBY legal situation.
That they lead in battery production is going to be pretty interesting to watch. I admit I was skeptical that current battery tech could be scaled up enough to make it financially doable, but China is very close to making me wrong on the topic. If they can be the first to truly seasonal storage that works without hand-waving games like pretending you can "just use another source" when you run out of storage I'll be very impressed.
They seem to understand that you need to back unreliable sources with reliable sources - and have the political means to build a coal plant that will sit idle 95% of the time.
No other country is close - it's parlor tricks at the moment. China seems to understand how energy works, and that you need a reliable grid to run an industrial economy. They are very much being pragmatic in how they are building out everything they possibly can. The West has forgotten this.
They’re building more dirty plants than anyone, but they’re STILL making their mix cleaner at an impressive clip. Over 80% of new electric demand growth was met by renewables in 2024.
> They also are building more coal, gas, and nuclear than anyone else at epic yearly increases.
Are they really? Coal use for power generation stopped growing, so newly built coal plants are replacing older, not adding to them. Nuclear while still being built does not seem to be accelerating anymore.
There's plenty to criticize about China, but as far as energy production goes they are a leader and have demonstrated what can be done when the country is aligned (albeit by force in this case) to provide cheap and clean energy to power their economy.
The US, under the current admin, is literally the opposite of that.
> I did not expect HN to become this geopolitical.
Everything is geopolitical now. Expect the hawks to look at the "success" of Iran and move on to bombing China soon.
China has a significant investment in solar and wind power - is that just to convince us it's a good idea to buy it?
if solar and wind is subsidized by europe or usa, selling solar and wind to them is great. taxpayer money goes east, everybody is happy, meanwhile china is constructing more coal plants than all the other countries combined https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/number-of...
Yes the share of electricity produced by coal plants is going down: https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/china/
So it appears they’re building more renewable capacity than coal capacity.
China leads the world in solar energy, by a wide margin. Yes, they have hedged their bets somewhat with coal, but you cannot claim with a straight face that China believes renewable energy is nonviable.
https://apnews.com/article/china-climate-solar-wind-carbon-e...
> they know windpower and solar are not viable long term
Why?
Steelman: in the 2000's and 2010's China did not know if wind power and solar were viable in the long term. They put a lot of money in wind & solar, but also lots of alternatives: nuclear, coal, hydro, geothermal.
By 2020 it was obvious that wind & solar were viable long term, so investments in nuclear et al dried up. But they weren't convinced that batteries were viable long term, so they built a lot of coal peakers for night power.
By 2025 it became obvious that batteries were more viable and cheaper than coal peakers, so they've started to build battery storage at a vast scale.
So steelman is that the OP's viewpoint is ~10 years out of date.
They know that sometimes it's not windy, and they know about night.
>They know that sometimes it's not windy, and they know about night.
they also know about batteries
Fortunately they also know about batteries.
> Web search how many Chinese coal plants came online in the last six months.
I did and it was actually very few. In 2024 88% of new electricity in China came from solar and wind. https://www.eia.gov/international/analysis/country/chn
You should try doing some research instead of lying.
> Over the last few years, we've graduated from providing cheap energy to now importing most of our energy.
Back in days of yore (2006/07) I read a well-argued policy paper from a quango that no longer exists where it pointed out that Ireland was one of the most fossil fuel dependent nations in the world (particularly due to oil imports).
Our energy prices first spiked around the same time, to "incentivise competition" in the words of a minister of the time.
All the while we have vast, vast reserves of potential wind energy sitting unused because of (mostly) grid and permitting failures. This was and is entirely in our control, but the government(s) (even with the sad exception of the Greens) simply haven't put enough resources into it (although the grid is getting investment, we need a lot more).
Also the critical infrastructure bill will (supposedly) help, but I'm sceptical as none of this ever seems to help.
Which is to say, that I completely agree with you that the costs here shouldn't be born by the poorer people in Ireland, and we need a whole of government approach to driving down the price of energy. This will take time, but the best time to start doing this is now.
My personal belief is that we should also aim to drive down the price of land, as the two biggest costs (for many countries) are land and energy, as they input into almost everything, but reducing land prices is a lot more controversial than reducing energy prices so we should start there.
Recent data on import depdency from a link someone posted:
> Ireland's energy import dependency was 79.6% in 2024, up from 78.3% in 2023 (for comparison, the EU average for 2023 was 58.3%).
> Ireland imported 100% of its oil, 79.5% of its gas, and 14.0% of its electricity in 2024.
Yup, things kinda suck because of our complete failure to get our fingers out here. Again, people keep trying to build better stuff, but the planning process and our very decentralised democratic processes don't. help.
Generation technology got cheap quickly, but the grid expansion needed to support it moves at a much slower pace
That's not how the international energy market works. You still have to buy your own, locally produced energy at international rates.
The huge energy price spikes are down to wars in Ukraine (gas, which is also used for electricity production) and the Middle East.
You don't have to, but you make more profit if you do. An energy producer that has the choice to sell energy for a lower price domestically or a higher price internationally will obviously choose the higher price, but you can make laws to make that illegal, if you want to.
Taiwan and perhaps other Asian countries that successfully make stuff don't expose their industries to this, the government sets a fixed energy price for them rather than leaving them at the whim of speculators.
Sure, but then the taxpayer has to pay for it anyway. https://news.tvbs.com.tw/english/2690584
"TAIPEI (TVBS News) — Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰) announced on Tuesday (Nov. 19 2024) plans to subsidize Taiwan Power Company (台灣電力公司) with NT$100 billion to address rising international fuel costs and stabilize prices"
=> over $3bn USD! This is not a small amount of money.
Typically markets are good at optimizing everything that is priced into the market.
Long term price stability is currently not something that is optimized for.
One way to solve it is of course abandoning the ide of a market economy for power.
Another is to let those industries that need price stability buy that on the futures market.
I agree that the government should ensure low energy prices for industry, but Taiwan is a remarkably poor example.
Taiwan's energy policy is, as far as I know, the most pants-on-head stupid of any country in the world. As anyone knows, they are a small island at constant risk of a sea blockade and yet rely on sea imports for 98% of their energy. Not only that, but they _had_ more domestic production (nuclear) that they have been phasing out. Writing giant checks to import yet more oil by sea instead of boosting domestic production is a terrible idea for so many reasons.
You are right that Taiwan doesn't. But it has consequences, Taipower is forced to undercharge against market prices, but is backstopped by the government.
At the end of the day, it's a global market, and if you want it 'cheap' someone has to pick up the tab. Either it's taxpayers now, taxpayers in the future or consumers now.
https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2025/03/23/2...
Ireland hasn't mined any coal in 35 years, this plant was not operating on domestic resources to begin with.
Anyway your actual problem are data center buildouts that are causing demand to skyrocket. They've gone from 5% of your electrical demand to >20% in less than a decade, and are the primary cause of your electricity crunch.
And even when we did mine coal, it was a small amount, and this plant never received any of it. It was designed from the start to run on imported coal, brought in on ships, and did not even have a rail connection.
I do often wonder with this kind of thing whether an unspoken aspect of it is about not depleting the country's fossil fuels
From what I understand Ireland has very little natural gas, very little coal and a not particularly large amount of peat. If they didn't shift towards importing all of that would be gone in the very near future.
It's a bit weird how it gets branded as a solely green move when there's clearly other motives for it.
> very little coal
For practical purposes no coal. There are no working coal mines in Ireland, and Moneypoint would have run entirely on imported coal since it was built. It was built with a bulk handling terminal for this purpose (very visible in photos of the plant: https://esb.ie/news---insights/inside-esb/moneypoint-power-s...).
Note that it doesn't have a rail link; even if there had been the desire to use domestic coal and someone had gotten a mine going, there would have been no way to get it there.
The true costs of the "cheap energy" were hidden. The high costs of the new approach are directly caused by policy decisions.
https://progressireland.substack.com/p/irish-electricity-is-...
Lots of signal that this top post is now an LLM an not "an Irish man". The generous use of dashes to complete the thought process..have a look: https://www.dcaulfield.com/chatgpt-learning-dev
See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47291513
Even if you ignore the climate impact, fossil fuels pollution causes millions of premature deaths a year, and unlike with global warming, that effect is localized. That alone should be reason to transition off of fossil fuels, especially coal which is the dirtiest.
Here in England we now drag the coal over on smoke spewing ships from Japan and Australia, rather than mine it here. The sum total of CO2 is higher than if we just mined it here. Net zero box ticking.
You don’t have any coal fired power stations and only a little coal used for other purposes compared to historical uses.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-by-end-user-uk
Your emissions are dropping fast
https://ourworldindata.org/profile/co2/united-kingdom
It’s not box ticking it’s the complexity of change.
We only use coal for steel. It's tiny. Ships are very efficient and our mines leak more methane than Aus ones, so the emissions are actually lower.
That's because we let all the industries go offshore, for the promises of Neoliberalism. That should never have happened either.
Goal-shifting aside, and be that as it may for offshoring, but Neoliberalism was Thatcher, and she was popular in part because the trade unions were seen as too powerful, which in part was because of the then-recent history of the coal miners' union going on strike and forcing a three-day week for much of British industry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Day_Week
> Here in England we now drag the coal over on smoke spewing ships from Japan and Australia, rather than mine it here
Australia I see but Japan? Japan is the world's third largest coal importer. I don't think they are sending much coal to England.
Oof. That paints it in a different light. They arent investing in renewables?
So glad you're taking the hit for the rest of us. Your sacrifice is totally worth the .001% difference you make, every little bit counts.
Why is it people can clearly see the recycling scam for what it was, but the idea of coal or carbon fuels makes them entirely unable to handle any sort of thinking that isn't entirely superficial and one-sided?
Maybe, like everything else in life, it's a complex series of tradeoffs, costs, and benefits, and you decide whether the cost is worth the benefit.
And if a policy being pushed doesn't make sense when all the costs and benefits are accounted for, then someone is doing something shady and making a shit ton of money, especially if there's a huge amount of smoke and mirrors and politicized talk.
Ireland's being used for things and it's obvious those in power don't care about and don't think the Irish people being affected by these sorts of policies can or will do anything about it. As that largely seems to be the case, I have to wonder if we're going to see a repeat of what seems to happen every time a government thinks that about the Irish and takes advantage of them.
We never had particularly cheap energy. The recent increases in energy cost were largely driven by gas price increases due to the war in Ukraine.
> we've graduated from providing cheap energy to now importing most of our energy.
... Eh? We've always imported most of our energy. Or, well, okay, since about the mid 19th century we've imported most of our energy. All coal used in Moneypoint was imported. We do produce some of our own gas, but it is not and never has been enough. The fraction of energy that we import has actually fallen somewhat due to wind and solar.
Electricity generated from peat peaked at 19.5% in 1990, apparently.
And that's far outstripped by the current figure for renewables (42% in 2025) - so renewables have enabled locally-sourced production to reach more than double the share that was ever managed in the peat-burning days.
(And the comparison is actually even better than it seems at first glance, given that the 2025 figures are all-island and the peat figures would be 3 or 4 points lower if you included NI. A good chunk of the 23.2% imports can probably also be classed as renewable, given that GB had a 47% renewable mix)
When AMOC collapses (which it will relatively soon) and Ireland is plunged into forever winter, get back to us on how great burning all that coal was.
Another Irishman here, completely agree with your comment. My domestic gas and electric bills have never been higher, insane inflation for nothing more than political virtue signalling.
> Another Irishman here, completely agree with your comment. My domestic gas and electric bills have never been higher, insane inflation for nothing more than political virtue signalling.
The only part of your bills that could be regarded as virtue signalling is the carbon tax, which is driven by government regulation. The vast increases in energy costs were driven firstly by Russia (when they invaded Ukraine) and the US (when they attacked Iran).
And this hits me too, I have (unfortunately) oil heating which has gone from about 500 to 800 over the course of the last week. Fortunately we filled up last month, but it's really worrying.
Ultimately though, the only way to fix this is to build a lot of wind (industrial scale) and solar (residential scale) as otherwise we're at the mercy of world events.
A LNG terminal would help. Lots of bad infrastructure decisions have left us extremely exposed to those external shocks you mentioned.
An LNG terminal wouldn't help with cost (it would probably increase it a bit, if anything, as the cost of building it would have to be paid back). It's desirable from an energy _security_ perspective; as it is we are very dependent on a pipeline to Britain.
Actually it should help with both, because a on-island terminal would also provide LNG storage capacity which would buffer short-term price fluctuations. We have zero such storage.
Again, our poor decision making around national infrastructure is on our governments. They left have left us completely exposed to international markets.
A lot of it relates to the planning process, they do keep trying to build things. One could argue that this is also their fault (and I do!) but there are good historical reasons (cough ray burke cough michael lowry) why we've ended up with such a bureaucratic, byzantine planning process.
Yeah, even though I voted (happily) for the Greens, I was very disappointed in them not building an LNG terminal, purely for energy security reasons. I'd be super happy if it never got used, but it's a cost worth paying just in case.
An LNG terminal would make us more beholden to foreign powers.
> An LNG terminal would make us more beholden to foreign powers
This is a weird way to justify using LNG brought in through Britain.
An LNG terminal would not help for the current high prices. Europe is experiencing a gas price shock precisely because LNG is easy to store and transport. Asia gets half it's gas through the Strait of Hormuz, which is currently experiencing troubles. This means Asia is willing to pay a lot of premium for LNG, which in turn means that Europe has to match this premium otherwise LNG will go to Asia and not Europe.
Being dependent on gas is equal to being exposed to global shocks, unless you can cover your domestic needs purely with domestic gas extraction.
Europe was getting cheap gas from Russia. It makes a big difference, the US gas is much more expensive.
American energy exports are turning around in the mid-atlantic to go somewhere else instead because Europe is getting outbid.
"My energy prices are high" because you are getting outbid. You can't stop getting outbid by building more transport infrastructure. That terminal will go unused.
> Ultimately though, the only way to fix this is to build a lot of wind (industrial scale) and solar (residential scale) as otherwise we're at the mercy of world events.
I'd add that this is only part of the equation because: what do you do on an overcast day with no wind?
You need significant storage capacity before you can become isolated from world events. Until then, you need power generation that you can bring online on short notice: coal, gas, hydro, etc. Traditionally, gas was used for this because it's easy to store, quick to get going and gas plants can also burn coal if needed.
Unfortunately, the nice properties of gas (easy to store and transport) mean that it's a global commodity. It will go where they pay the most, which means that far away events can cause a price in gas prices globally.
> I'd add that this is only part of the equation because: what do you do on an overcast day with no wind?
Battery technology is really, really getting there.
And in the absence of any more improvements here (unlikely) you integrate your grids with other countries. That's harder for Ireland, but it's still worth doing.
Carbon taxes are huge, and they are 100% politically imposed.
And they're often disingenously included in fossil fuel pricing to claim that green energy is fundamentally cheaper.
I believe in climate change, and I believe in doing something about it. But being disingenous with the public is only going to create resentment and resistance to Net Zero.
> And they're often disingenously included in fossil fuel pricing to claim that green energy is fundamentally cheaper.
There’s nothing unreasonable about this: fossil fuels have huge costs associated with them that are invisible to the consumer. They’ve just been getting pushed off onto other people forever.
Don't let the populist sentiment gain you, this has nothing to do with environmentalism. You want a scape-goat? Blame the decades of neoliberalism that led to such under-investments in our public infrastructure.
ChatGPT : "tell me about China use of coal energy"
"China is by far the largest consumer and producer of coal in the world. Coal has historically been the backbone of China’s rapid industrialization and still plays a dominant role in its energy system."
- ~55–60% of China’s electricity comes from coal (varies slightly year to year).
- China consumes more coal than the rest of the world combined.
- Annual consumption: roughly 4–4.5 billion tons per year.
- China produces about 50% of global coal output
The west suffers while China does whatever it wants, at a Grand Scale.
Yes, China consumes a lot of coal. But they are trying to consume less. You cannot ask a developing country to go back on its merging into the first world by consuming less energy or investing in more expensive sources only. We westerners are here because we grew on cheap and dirty energy, what moral ground do we have to ask them to stop growing?
Coal was almost 100% of China energy consumption only 15 years ago, with a bit of hydro. Today they are very aggressively shifting towards anything but coal, as you found in ChatGPT, to less than 60% of coal in the mix. For comparison, the US is almost at the same point today than 15 years ago, only significantly replaced coal with more gas. A country that is consuming about the same amount of energy since 2000, while China consumes 5x.
Can't blame GPT I guess it wasn't trained that recently but China is now taking steps to rectify that.
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/china-...
Cheap energy from coal is very expensive energy. Who’s going to clean up the pollution? Carbon capture uses a lot of energy
Reminds me of the FT article on the UK's energy transition and how costs were being spread through the system.
https://www.ft.com/content/86fdb9e4-3db4-4e4f-8e47-580a1fad2...
Made some reasonable points imo
It's insanity to stop using country own resources and rely on unreliable tech and energy imports.
As I browse the comments here I lament that most "above average IQ" folks still don't get this simple truth.
Ireland hasn't mined coal at all for about 40 years and _never_ really mined any significant part of its usage; even in the 19th century Ireland imported coal. Moneypoint was designed from the start to run on imported coal; it had no rail link, and a bloody great bulk-handling port attached to it. Getting rid of Moneypoint actually increased energy security (we do produce _some_ of our own natural gas, and the renewables don't require imports).
It's a marker of low IQ populism to believe things are simple and that the elite/technocracy/whatever is trying to hide that truth from us while making sure to never research why that might be so that they can keep on playing the blame game.
No if you allow to exit the simplistic low/high IQ paradigm you set up, I just can't take seriously comments like this who have not even started to try to show that they have any grip on the subject at all. Heck you haven't even tried to assess the quantity/availability of Ireland's "own resource". Do you seriously want Ireland to relay on peat ? How long would that last ?
Hard to see past the scientific consensus on global warming
It's not actually a scientific consensus
The real insanity is to keep burning that coal, that we know will render large part of the Earth uninhabitable if we don't stop ASAP. Also, it's more expensive than cleaner energy. You want a culprit so bad? Blame EU neoliberalism whose auterity has diverted important, necessary funds from our energy grid and left us in this delicate position.
The longer we put off solving climate change, the more expensive it is going to be for the poor and middle-classes.
> providing cheap energy to now importing most of our energy
Source for this claim? figures show 10-15% of power is imported, not "most", and those fluctuate with wind generation.
Energy ≠ electricity
Same in the UK. Instead of us generating electricity via coal, we get other people to do it less cleanly and import it instead. That way our hands are clean.
The bigger issue might be whether the transition is being managed in a way that protects consumers
In this thread: the rich, unaffected class instruct the poor that their plight is in fact a fabrication. History really does repeat itself.
Where was that coal coming from?
What's your source for Irish coal energy being cheap!?
Another Irishman here. Stop trying to harken back to some notional "good old days" that didn't exist. People are better off than they've ever been. Energy was always expensive relative to income. When I was a kid in the 80s, we weren't allowed to turn on the central heating unless there were arctic conditions. The main issue driving COL issues is the complete lack of social housing construction for the last 15 years. You can't blame the tree huggers for that. Renewable energy is a matter of national security, and prevents our hard earned money being sent overseas to regimes like Russia and all the charmers in the Middle East. Our very first electricity plant as a free state was hydro ffs.
I have never been to a country where the wind blows at plus 60kph for months at a time (Wexford). I don't think I have ever been there in the last 20 years where the wind has not been howling, the potential for Wind Power there is insane.....
Hey you're still better than Germany that closed all their eco friendly power down and started importing so much energy it's had an effect on prices in Sweden!
I mean, at least you shut down the coal plants, those are legit bad for the environment. Germans shut down nuclear which is clean.
Why not make the rich pay for this? They can afford it. You're taking your anger out on the wrong people.
https://beyondfossilfuels.org/europes-coal-exit/ keeps track of coal phase-out commitments. 24 European countries still use coal generators, and 6 have not even planned to phase them out (Serbia, Moldova, Turkey, Poland, Kosovo, Bosnia).
Never used coal power:
Phased out: Phase-out planned:Moldova's coal plant is in Transnistria, a territory occupied by Russia. There are no phasing out plans because we have no control over it.
For Sweden, the coal plants were exclusively for cogeneration (district heating with electricity as a byproduct) and only used as peaker plants in winter. Some of them still exist but have been converted to burn biofuels instead, mostly woodchips and other byproducts from the forestry industry.
For most practical purposes, Swedish electricity generation has been basically fossile free since the 1980's.
Estonia has lots of oil shale (not same thing as shale oil). They never needed to import coal, because they have their own fossil fuel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Estonia#Oil-shale
This is true. A nuance often missed. Different rock (that is considerably worse in several ways, needs heavy fuel oil to be added to actually burn and has I think even higher co2 output per unit of energy) but kinda the same.
> Never used coal power:
> Albania, Cyprus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Switzerland, Norway
I very much doubt this is true for any of those countries. In fact, I know it is untrue for Switzerland, although they did stop using it long ago (mid 20th century).
Edit: Norway actually ran a coal power plant until 2023, on Spitsbergen
I agree that the wording is a little misleading. "No coal ever in the electricity mix" is what's stated on the site.
It seems they consider only coal use in the 21st century in mainland Europe + UK (i.e. not Greenland, Iceland, Svalbard, etc.).
This is now how we should be looking at the problem. It doesn't matter if you burn coal yourself or not. What matters is the source of your energy. Every single one of those countries imports energy from other markets which consume fossil fuels for production.
No country will be truly coal-free until they are a net energy exporter and they do not import any goods that use coal-based energy in their supply chain. Europe has de-industrialized which means it has effectively exported its coal burden.
>No country will be truly coal-free
Being coal-free is possible. Being fossil-fuel free is harder. Most of Irish energy comes from Natural Gas and Oil - the former is what supplanted Coal, not Wind.
Being coal free is a good enough goal in itself, getting off fossil fuels completely in the short term was always a stupid, irrational and religious idea.
If the world transitioned everything currently on coal to Nat gas, along with population decline that's happening, it solves the worst effects of climate change for the rest our lives (Nat gas provides the same power as coal at half the emissions, so 2X less Co2 and 10X less on many air pollutants).
And in the next 100 years if we haven't made fossil fuels irrelevant with cheap modular fission OR made fusion viable OR made space solar viable, then something horrible has happened and Co2 emissions will be the least of our worries.
There are existing metrics that adjust for this. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-emissions...
I agree. Whenever numbers show that China is the largest CO2 polluter currently, it needs to be mentioned that China manufactures much of the world's physical goods.
China's CO2 emissions have been falling for the last 2 years, even as they've increased their manufacturing capacity.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...
https://globalenergymonitor.org/projects/global-coal-plant-t...
They have more coal power plants planned and your data hickup worked out during recensions and covid.
This doesn't mean what you think it does:
- China is also decommissioning older plants.
- These new coal plants aren't running 24x7
- Peak coal usage is likely to be very soon in China (this year even according to some); after that coal usage flatten and start declining; all the way to a planned net zero in the 2060s.
The newer plants are designed to be more efficient, more flexible, and less polluting than the older ones. They are better at starting/stopping quickly/cheaply. Older coal plants used big boilers that had to heat up to build up steam before being able to generate power. This makes stopping and starting a plant slow and expensive. Because they consume a lot of fuel just to get the plant to the stage where it can actually generate power. The more often plants have to be stopped and started, the more wasteful this is. With the newer plants this is less costly and faster.
This makes them more suitable to be used in a non base load operational model where they can be spun up/down on a need to have basis. This is essential in a power grid that is dominated by the hundreds of GW of solar, wind, and battery.
In 2024, well after Covid, 88% of new electric capacity added in China came from renewables.
https://www.eia.gov/international/analysis/country/chn
Their existing grid uses coal because they have coal, just like the US uses gas because it has gas. And obviously as old coal plants are retired they're going to build new ones. They don't use the new plants for additional capacity. As they add more solar and storage, which they're building a lot of, they're going to absolutely crush the coal burning too. It's literally a national security issue for them.
An EV running half on coal is better than a gasoline car for carbon emissions. A similar story for heat pumps.
China is more electrified than most Western nations and getting more so faster than Europe or the US:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-as-a-share-of...
As other posters below you have pointed out, it's not as simple as you make it out. You can't just stop building power plants overnight. The population and demands of China are growing and those needs need to be met immediately. There is no simpler, more understood way of rolling out new energy than building coal & gas power plants.
But look at the data. They are building clean energy solutions at a faster rate than any other country on the planet - by a huge margin. Scaling clean energy solutions is what we need, and it has to be done alongside the gradual phase-out of coal and gas.
Coal is a lot cheaper and easier than modern energy sources when your goal is modernizing rural areas. Meanwhile, urban centers are decommissioning old emissive power plants and shifting to renewables. It's a fine way to do green transition and rural development.
Baseload coal plants are also being converted into peaker plants to deal with solar and wind intermittency.
As other comments already point out, chinese coal power plants do not always operate under full load. They also decomission older more polluting ones.
Setting that aside, China has also dramatically pushed the electrification of their transportation sector like no one else. Considering BEVs and other electric modes of transport require less primary energy than fossil fuel equivalents, this checks out.
I wonder if on-shorting manufacturing would mean a higher increase in CO2 because China is leading the world in green energy creation.
It should also be mentioned that despite being the factory of the world, China's CO2 emissions per capita are nearly half of the United States and comparable to some European countries.
> It should also be mentioned that despite being the factory of the world, China's CO2 emissions per capita are nearly half of the United States and comparable to some European countries.
To be fair, there's a large (~300mn) agricultural population in China who don't use developed country levels of energy. Nonetheless, this is still good.
Rural areas do not use much energy but Chinese cities are also more energy efficient per capita because of density and use of public transportation, walking, or electric mini scooters.
Export is only a small part of their emissions.
Air quality will improve, just not CO2
Somehow that’s an often missed aspect of this. Yeah, ditching coal has a wide array of nice side effects. It has killed many, many more than the world’s nuclear accidents.
Coal probably kills more people in a single day than all nuclear accidents ever combined
It's worse than that, it's every 3 to 7 hours of fossil fuel pollution roughly equaling the total death toll of all nuclear power accidents in history (around 4000 indirectly, most from cancer resulting from Chernobyl - but there's only around 100 total in a direct way).
Probably but damage from nuclear accidents isn't only measured in deaths. No coal plant accident has caused an exclusion zone for 40 years.
I think that depends on where you draw the line around the term "coal plant." There have been plenty of coal ash disasters that result in years of exclusion (for purposes of habitation, drinking water, fishing, etc.)[1][2][3][4]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_Creek_flood
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_County_coal_slurry_spil...
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_County_water_crisis
Exclusion zones are great for nature:
https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/how-chernobyl-ha...
So The "worst case scenario" for nuclear power is creating a new wildlife park free from human interference.
Only because the damage is more diffuse.
Have you ever seen the common medical advice that pregnant women should avoid eating more than a few servings of seafood every week, and avoid certain kinds entirely, because they’re all contaminated with mercury? A huge portion of that mercury comes from burning coal. How’s that for an exclusion zone?
Or for a big long list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Superfund_sites
If you look at net damage to the planet, fossil fuel burning energy sources kill literally 8 million+ people a year. Coal plants are vastly more radioactive than nuclear plants, and the effects of burning coal will have a vastly outsized share of damage to the planet in the long than nuclear. Its effects are just less concentrated to a single area.
And not all nuclear plants are the same. I don’t think it’s reasonable at all to compare Chernobyl to modern reactor designs, just because they both use the word “nuclear”.
Apso not sure if you are including coal mining, and all of the deaths and negative health outcomes as a result of the industry
Most of the exclusion zone is political nonsense. And overall coal has made much more areas much worse to live in. I rather live in the exclusion zone then next many coal plants.
Also there is a single case that happened from a non-western design. When looking at western countries like France, it shows how incredibly safe the whole industry is end to end.
Chernobyl's political nonsense was mostly down to the USSR wanting to deny that anything had, or possibly could, go wrong; if anything, the exclusion zone is the opposite of the western nonsense about nuclear power.
It's our unique freedom-themed nonsense, not the Soviet dictatorial-nonsense, which means we have radiation standards strict enough that it's not possible to convert a coal plant into a nuclear plant without first performing a nuclear decontamination process due to all the radioisotopes in the coal.
That said, perhaps that's actually a problem with the coal plants rather than nuclear standards: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-69285-4
> When looking at western countries like France, it shows how incredibly safe the whole industry is end to end.
Relative to coal, absolutely. But don't assume western countries are immune to propaganda on these things, nuclear reactors are there for the spicy atoms, not the price tag or public safety.
Why even make it about nuclears vs coal? Both are bad, both are hazards and both are not green energy.
Because coal desposits in the ground have bits of Uranium and Thorium which are radioactive, they get concentrated in coal fly ash, and blow out the chimney in the smoke from a coal power plant, and kill people, they leach into the soil and waterways, and kill people.
That is, nuclear power plants only kill people by radioactivity in the case of an accident. Coal power plants do it in normal operation. As well as coal dust having a PM2.5 dust problem which kills people.
Make it about nuclear vs coal because people say coal is better than nuclear because it's not scary radiation, and it actually is.
> "Both are bad"
Nuclear generates more power from a Kg of fuel, with less CO2 pollution and fewer deaths. It's not bad, but even if it was bad it's not "both sides", it's much less bad.
[yes coal disasters also kill hundreds of people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aberfan_disaster ]
Because people are petrified of nuclear but fine with coal. The opposite should be true.
I don’t think nuclear is the answer to things. But replacing every ounce of coal used for fuel with nuclear would still be a win.
Nuclear energy can be used to generate 24x7 energy as the grid-power to supply energy to a country whereas Solar and Wind require batteries.
I think that the last time I checked, when you take into factor the CO2 emissions and everything, Nuclear is the best source of Energy.
> I don’t think nuclear is the answer to things
I think that I am interested in seeing thorium based reactors or development with that too. That being said, Nuclear feels like the answer to me.
Feel free to correct me if you think I am wrong but I don't think that there is any better form of energy source than nuclear when you factor in everything.
Batteries are cheaper and faster to make in large quantities.
No economy on the planet needs 24/7 peak power production. The times humans work correspond nicely with the times the sun is out.
Daytime doesn't mean the sun is out; the UK has heavy cloud cover and sunset near 4pm in mid-winter. https://grid.iamkate.com/ shows the UK is currently getting 10% of grid power from Solar at 3:30pm in March.
Sure. That's why there's the "interconnectors" section further down; the UK can take advantage of the fact that it's rarely simultaneously dark and zero wind across entire continents.
> Batteries are cheaper and faster to make in large quantities.
Yes I agree but their extraction at scale is still very C02 Expensive.
> No economy on the planet needs 24/7 peak power production. The times humans work correspond nicely with the times the sun is out.
With Nuclear energy, let's face it. If you have a nuclear plant running, the input is just some uranium which we have plenty of. Thereotically we have no problem with running at peak power production.
You are also forgetting that Sun can be blocked during times of rains and Wind is unpredictable as well.
If you can work with solar panels only that's really really great. Unfortunately that's not how the world works or how I see it function :(
You are forgetting that markets operate after work and the late night culture and so many other things. You need lights at energy and quite a decent bit. You are also forgetting that if we ever get Electric vehicles then we would need energy during late night as well.
A lot of energy in general is still needed during nights and would we be still burning coal for that?
With all of this, I am not sure why you'd not like Nuclear?
> You are also forgetting that Sun can be blocked during times of rains and Wind is unpredictable as well.
We already have wires that cross continents to smooth out supply variations. It's exceedingly rare you get no sun and no wind over entire continents for an extended period.
> You are forgetting that markets operate after work and the late night culture and so many other things.
I'm not forgetting it, they just use less power.
You can see this easily in charts of supply/demand throughout the day: https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook#section-net-demand-tren...
> A lot of energy in general is still needed during nights and would we be still burning coal for that?
Again, batteries.
> We already have wires that cross continents to smooth out supply variations. It's exceedingly rare you get no sun and no wind over entire continents for an extended period.
I can be wrong but you would probably lose tons of efficiency even within High Voltage DC lines if everyday late night we take energy from different countries. Also this is getting outside of topic of discussion for me because one of the reasons we want Nuclear or Green energy in general is also the environmental plus the sovereign plus the long term affordability plans.
Another point from your first comment but if we run peak production in nuclear say in a country A, then the country A can also give power to Country B at late night similar to what you are proposed for solars.
> Again, batteries.
Once again, within my first comment I raise issue of battery. You mention a comment and I respond and then we get to batteries again.
I have no problem with solar at all without batteries but batteries really flip the equation in terms of environmental concerns.
My question is plain and simple, Why not Nuclear? I understand, I am not against Solar. Although environmentally, I feel like battery is a valid concern.
I am just saying that long term, Nuclear seems to be the better/best option. Why not Nuclear? That is a question which it seems that you may not have answered and that's a discussion worth having as well In my opinion too.
We can agree on this, correct?
> You mention a comment and I respond and then we get to batteries again.
Yes. Because they're the answer here.
> Also this is getting outside of topic of discussion for me because one of the reasons we want Nuclear or Green energy in general is also the environmental plus the sovereign plus the long term affordability plans.
Good luck with nuclear sovereignty, if that's your concern. How many uranium mines are in the UK?
> Why not Nuclear?
/me gestures at the last 50 years of historical evidence
"Why not try nuclear" is like "why not try communism?" for physics nerds. We have tried it.
> Good luck with nuclear sovereignty, if that's your concern. How many uranium mines are in the UK?
I can't speak about UK but considering how cheap Uranium is, can UK not do cost analysis. Uranium is abundant material compared to Oil/Coal.
> /me gestures at the last 50 years of historical evidence
> "Why not try nuclear" is like "why not try communism?" for physics nerds. We have tried it.
Maybe, but I think that, I can speak about the problem within US which I can better explain but US had nuclear fearmongering attempts and Senators passed laws which increased regulations on it to the point that some regulations contradict past regulations.
Nuclear power plants being built on loan in such a flimsy regulatory market was what lead to the downfall essentially within US
Nuclear fearmongering and lobbying efforts from Oil Industry as they are one of the most strong opposers of nuclear energy[0]
Once again, how do I explain this but nuclear produces 3.2x less carbon emissions than Solar[1]
We are able to build hydropower plants, we are able to launch spaceships into moon and outer space. It's definitely possible to build nuclear if lobbying effort decreases.
I'd say that its our dependence on Oil and Coal which have been the problem. I have nothing against solar and that is something that I am saying from the start. At some point we should look towards transition towards nuclear as well. To give up on that would simply not be ideal.
[0]: https://climatecoalition.org/who-opposes-nuclear-energy/
[1]: https://solartechonline.com/blog/how-much-co2-does-solar-ene...
> I can't speak about UK but considering how cheap Uranium is, can UK not do cost analysis. Uranium is abundant material compared to Oil/Coal.
Wait until you hear how cheap and abundant sunlight and wind are!
Economically useful uranium deposits are only proven in a handful of countries.
> We are able to build hydropower plants, we are able to launch spaceships into moon and outer space. It's definitely possible to build nuclear if lobbying effort decreases.
This is the "well we haven't tried real communism" argument again.
What’s wrong with nuclear energy?
Not cost competitive with solar+batteries in many locales (less so the closer to the poles), and no learning curve, if anything a negative learning curve, nuclear never was more expensive than new nuclear.
And off course societal (and geopolitical) acceptance issues.
Its really, really, really expensive to build.
And people are (mostly irrationally) terrified of it, which matters in democracies.
Respectfully, Can you tell me more about it because I genuinely don't know how you think Nuclear energy is bad. It's one of the cleanest forms of energy.
Is there any particular reason why you think Nuclear is bad in all honesty as its worth having a discussion here? Why do you feel Nuclear Energy is a hazard?
I understand if you feel Chernobyl or any event makes it sound dangerous but rather, Please take a look at this data on the number of death rates per unit of electricity production[0]
Oil is roughly 615x more deadly than nuclear. Nuclear, Solar and Wind (the renewables) are all less deadly and are 0.03,0.02 and 0.04 respectively and nuclear is a reliable source of energy source which can be used in actual generation.
Nuclear is very much a green energy. I'd like to hear your opinion about it.
[0]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
Also the fact that it greatly lessens energy dependence should not be understated.
Europe is less industrial than in the past, but by every measure I can find many countries (especially Germany, Poland, Slovakia, Italy) are significantly more industrialized than the US - around 1.5x to 3x as much industrial activity and employment per capita, depending on the measure. Even the very least industrialized of the major EU nations (e.g. Spain, Greece) only just drop down to match the US numbers per-capita.
The issue is very complex. First - broad generalization - Europe's surviving industry is mostly made of less critical industries. If you look at important things in the world, and the important things that make up or make those important things, a tiny fraction of that is European, and that fraction is shrinking rapidly. There are some things - there is some green manufacturing stuff going on, there is some high-precision stuff in IT/CH/DE, there is ASML and Airbus, Poland can actually make things, etc. - but where will that be in ten or twenty years? I'll tell you: the high-precision stuff is rapidly moving to Asia, the green manufacturing is not very cost effective and uses a lot of imported core technologies, the C919 is going to fly with Chinese engines soon... the list goes on. The EU badly wants to make solar panels, cutting edge chips, fighter jets, rockets et cetera - and it simply can't, not at the cutting edge. The US, on the other hand, can make all of those things. It is still behind China in manufacturing overall, but it can still make a lot of the cutting edge, and it is still innovating.
Second, a lot of the EU stuff is already dead and only continues to exist through inertia. The median German cars and machine tools are worse than the median Chinese and they cost far more.
Third, those numbers often reflect the nebulous concept of "value added." Let's take the case of a refrigerator. Chinese company manufactures every technical part of the refrigerator and ships it to their EU business partner for €100. EU partner assembles it, fills it with foam, and sells it for €600. Most of the "value added" was in the EU! Win for the EU! Go EU manufacturing! The concept of "value added" is the basis for the entire EU VAT system and much of its economic indicators and incentives, while in the US it is almost never mentioned. This is also the source of the most hilarious comparisons (Greek manufacturing superior to the US per capita? χαχαχα)
If you want to cut through the bullshit, you have to look at actual things made. Among the US/CN/EU, who leads: Solar panels (CN), cutting edge chips (US), chipmaking equipment (EU), jet engines (US), aircraft (US), space launch vehicles (US), fighter jets (US), batteries (CN), nuclear reactors (CN), submarines (US), advanced missiles (US), cars (CN), CNC machines (CN), machine tools (CN), precision bearings and linear motion systems (CN), cutting edge medical equipment (US), gas turbines (US/EU), high voltage grid equipment (CN), telecom equipment (CN), construction equipment (US), ships (CN), advanced optics (EU), electric motors (CN), steel (CN), aluminum (CN), oil (US), cutting edge pharma (US), industrial robots (CN), wind turbines (CN), trains (CN), agricultural machinery (US/EU), drones (CN), smartphones (CN.) From that list, China leads eighteen, the US leads eleven, the EU leads two, and the EU and US are tied for two. And China is closing in fast on chipmaking. When China takes that crown, what will the EU have left?
The goal of net energy exporter assumes that energy produced at one time can be exchange for energy produced at an other time for the same price, and that assumption has not been true in Europe for decades. You can be a net energy exporter and still be dependent energy imports for more than 50% of the energy a country consumes, as has been demonstrated by Denmark.
I will happily trade 10 unit of energy for just a single unit of energy, assuming I get to decide when I give the 10 units and when I can demand the 1 unit. A lot of profit in the European energy market can be made by such a "bad" deal.
The date when a country energy grid is free from fossil fuels, like coal, is when the grid has no longer any demand during the year for producing or importing energy produced by fossil fuels.
Europe is a gigantic manufacturer of vast quantities of goods. It has not deindustrialised at all.
It's more nuanced than that. This article is about the US (a worse polluter than Ireland), but it shows only about a small difference because of offshoring emissions: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/no-the-us-didnt-outsource-our-...
I don't know if I buy this argument. If the US sends oil to another country, which burns it for energy, produces a finished good and exports that back to the US, then the CO2 released isn't accounted for in production-based numbers. But it seems to me like it isn't really properly accounted for in the consumption-based numbers that Noah is holding up, because those are effectively giving the US a credit for exporting the oil in the first place that offsets the imported good. As he says, the US's exports are carbon-intensive and that largely explains the difference being so small.
Noah also tries to refute the perception that manufacturing is in decline in the US, but he doesn't adjust per-capita and doesn't account for the obvious fact that major US exports are looking more and more like raw materials and less like finished goods, while imports are the other way around. Aircraft and ICs used to compete for top spot on the US export list. Since 2008 it's petroleum and oil.
It's even more nuanced than that because the United States is made up of many different states, with many different energy policies. Ireland would most closely equate to the state of Massachusetts by population and economic size, and Massachusetts shut down its last coal plant almost a decade ago.
What is the point of comparing the US to Ireland? Perhaps compare it to something like the state of Oklahoma.
That's true to an extent, but it also sets a bar that almost no country could meet in a globalized economy
Steel is the tough one - the vast majority of new steel is produced using blast furnaces and coke. DRI is still a fringe product.
I mean, the UK proudly trumpets that they're coal-free, while entertaining a new coking coal mine.
Steel is also a small percentage of coal use. The vast majority of coal is used for electricity generation.
Putting numbers on that (for the us) from 2022 [1]:
Electric power—469.9 MMst—91.7%
Industrial total—41.9 MMst—8.2%
Commercial—0.8 MMst—0.2%Getting down to 6% of our current coal use would be amazing. So much lung cancer and asthma would be prevented.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/coal/use-of-coal.php
europes coal powerplants are in china, its polution is in china, the products of china are in europe and the producers from china live in europe and the us. China even offers greenwashing as a service, so people can buy for green notes a green consciousness.
> europes coal powerplants are in china, its polution is in china, the products of china are in europe and the producers from china live in europe and the us.
This is generally overstated. Emissions imported or exported via trade are significantly smaller than domestic emissions for almost every country. In the EU vs China case, accounting for imported/exported emissions basically changes which of the two is doing better, but emission levels are pretty close to begin with (US is already doing significantly worse than China either way).
For China, we are talking about ~1 ton/person/year from trade (in favor of China), while local emissions are at ~8 tons/person/year [1].
You make a valid point, but looking at the actual numbers it turns out that this makes (surprisingly) little difference.
[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/imported-or-exported-co-e...
This is what matters. The whole thing is an exercise in greenwashing. It doesn't matter if you stop burning coal in your own country, if the energy you import is also made by burning oil and gas.
The whole conversation about clean energy is polluted by the complete misunderstanding of the general population of how energy demands are balanced. Saying you're replacing coal and gas with wind is just nonsense. It's one solution to a bigger problem. The big problem is how to balance your grid across peaks and troughs and that requires a diverse set of clean energy solutions, with wind being one small part of it.
Great to see, hopefully they can end turf burning too. (For those unaware it's basically where you take a wetland habitat that's also an amazing carbon store, cut it in to chunks, dry it out, and burn it for a very dirty heat source)
It will virtually end when it is no longer economically advantageous. In my mother's hometown in Mayo, most home heat was solid fuel, and it's gradually turning to electric heat pumps. The other alternative, heating oil, is very expensive and not renewable, but also used a lot. I think the turf is starting to run out because the use of it has gone way down. Either that or fewer homes have a legacy parcel of bog.
they should use that turf for insulation instead
I don't think turf (peat) has been burned for energy generation since 2023.
True, I was referring to domestic heat in rural areas.
Unfortunately I think that's going to be very, very hard to sell to many people here in rural Ireland (Roscommon in my case). I would really love to see people stop burning turf but it's such a strong cultural thing that in some parts you'd be ostracised for even thinking the thought.
I've personally spoken to people (who are otherwise quite environmentally aware) who suggest they'd never vote for the Green Party because they'd take their turf away. It's a tough sell.
I think they should be allowed for cultural reasons but only if cut by hand like we did when I was a kid :)
> I think they should be allowed for cultural reasons but only if cut by hand like we did when I was a kid :)
Me too! That was a lot of work, and surprisingly hard to stack.
And turning it would cut your fingers to shreds! But it was great if the weather was fine.
Which it almost never was :/
How much impact does it realistically have on climate change? I would expect it to be relatively small compared to things like owning a car?
In a perfect world we would want to reduce emissions as much as possible in every facet of life, but in the real world I think we should pick battles that have the biggest impact.
I think the domestic heating use is a drop in the bucket compared to commercial extraction of peat for export, or historical use for electricity generation.
I've only so many shits to give, and people heating their homes doesn't rank.
People heating their homes can be very sigificant. In the UK ~15% of all its territorial GHGs come from heating with gas: actual CO2 from the home boiler flues.
CO2 from small amounts of rural home heating is probably not the big thing to be worried about, especially if local recent biomass, eg wood from forest management. But there are still nasties (PMs, biodiversity losses, etc) to be considered and that should be dealt with in due course.
The actual quantity of people burning turf for home heat is tiny, though.
At least in 2004 (not sure if it's still the case) there are some homes which still burned coal for heat. That is the nastiest smell out there.
On cold mornings you can see the wood smoke hanging over the town of Taos New Mexico. It's easy to see even a little bit of haze in the otherwise crystal clear air. Taos is in general a very environmentally conscious place. The KTAO radio station has been solar powered since the early 1990s. It also has a significant population of low wage tourism industry workers.
Your username made me chuckle!
;) thanks.
very funny
Peat is probably the worst fuel from a carbon perspective
And Germany of all places mines huge amounts of brown coal, which is only barely not peat.
If you use Renewable Energy Sources, it may happen there will be no wind or no sun. So you need some auxiliary source of energy. If you want it at hand, this must be something with fast cold start. So black/brown coal power plan will not help you, similarly nuclear. You need to burn either gas or "biomass", that is wood/turf, etc. Those power plants have about 1h cold start.
Hence, in order to have RES you need to emit CO2. Deal with this. The other option, and UK goes that way, is to purchase electricity when it is lacking, paying spot prices, that's why they have such a big electricity bills, economy is down, people get mad and vote psychos.
The solution is dead simple, as France example shows. Simply use nuclear power plants and does not bother with RES, as it does not make any sense now.
Maybe, when we have technology to store efficiently electricity at scale, we can start using RES. But we just do not have that.
The end result now is that electricity in Europe is the most expensive on the World, so all manufacturing is moved to Asia, who does not bother with climate that much, that's why, despite all Europe efforts, overall CO2 emission keeps growing.
> If you use Renewable Energy Sources, it may happen there will be no wind or no sun
I still find it staggering that people feel like this is something that needs to be said as if it’s surprising or a novel idea. Do you really believe smart people haven’t been working through these challenges for decades?
Did he state it like it's a surprise? Not like there's anything wrong with bringing up this fact.
Yet somehow we don't need a similar reminder for the possibility of fossil fuel power plants running out of fuel after a short time if not regularly restocked. Why is it worth bringing up one, but not the other?
> If you use Renewable Energy Sources, it may happen there will be no wind or no sun
If you have to import fuel, it may happen that no ships can get through. Or the fuel becomes too expensive to buy because of war, natural disasters, or market forces. Ain't nobody turning off the sun or wind.
> Maybe, when we have technology to store efficiently electricity at scale
Actually we have it now.
Battery storage that works at grid-scale is a fairly recent technological innovation. It's good that humanity figured out this technological innovation, and demand for better battery technology from the smartphone and electric car revolutions had a lot to do with it. But battery storage is still expensive and relatively-new physical infrastructure that takes time and expense to deploy at scale, and it's still in the process of happening now.
> If you use Renewable Energy Sources, it may happen there will be no wind or no sun.
Yes, but this rarely happens, so any potential solution should be designed around it being idle 99% of the time.
> Those power plants have about 1h cold start.
Gas turbines can spin up significantly faster. However, the weather is quite predictable, so it is unlikely that this will be needed. Besides, battery storage is the perfect solution as an ultra-fast ramp-up holdover source until the turbines are at 100%.
> Hence, in order to have RES you need to emit CO2.
Or you equip the handful of gas turbines you use to make up for that 1% gap in renewables with carbon capture? It's not ideal, but it is very much doable.
> Simply use nuclear power plants and do not bother with RES
... and have your electricity be even more expensive?
Pumped storage hydro is extremely cheap and efficient and has been around for more than a century. LiFePo4 batteries are now cheap enough that they're a cost-competitive alternative. Flywheel storage plugs the inertia gap nicely.
The tech exists - it's mostly just a matter of political will. The economics already justify it. People are making considerable money by starting up BESSs (Battery Energy Storage Systems) and doing time arbitrage on energy.
cf. Iberia, who recently learned that effective storage and intertial pick-up is integral to a stable and efficient power network, and are now spending heavily on both.
> Pumped storage hydro
It's a pipedream. Yes it's cheap and efficient, but it requires the geography and the will to destroy a local ecosystem.
BESS is what will ultimately win. It's pretty energy dense and it can be deployed on pretty much any junk land location. The only fight you'll have is with the neighbors who don't like it.
My power company, Idaho power, is deploying a 200MWh BESS on a slice of land they've owned for decades near one of their substations. The hardest part has been the permitting (which is now done).
Cheap as in "requires proper location and the destruction of ecology on large scale" cheap?
Edit:
https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/features/energy-storage-ana...
To cover Europe's need you only need to build 70 1.5 GW hydroelectric stations at a cost of $92 billion (in reality much higher) while greatly damaging ecology in large areas.
(The link has rather detailed info)
This source also offers an option of $1 Trillion USD to do it with battery storage.
All of Europe. $1 Trillion USD. Oh, and that figure has already fallen by 1/3rd in reality and the article claims it should drop by half again.
And that seems to be assuming you only have wind power as input. The long lull periods that drive the high storage requirements are, as that article claims, caused by large high pressure air masses. High pressure systems like that often come with clear skies! Indeed, go look at weather history for that same 2015 period and you see that the skies were calm and clear, and precipitation was about half the "normal" amount for that time of year. While there is perfect correlation between a windless day and a night without sunlight, battery to get you through the night is trivial and solved far more cheaply than this article seems to understand. Enough battery to maintain 24 hour output for a solar farm is cheap enough to compete with fossil fuels. Long term, wind and solar do not correlate, so it's very rare to have long lulls in both at the same time.
So this article is leaving out important details and also is way more pessimistic than even it admits is true.
That also ignores that even in the "lulls", wind never seems to go to zero, so even in lulls, you can always just have more wind. Building 10x as much wind as you need is not as feasible as building 10x as much solar as you need though IMO.
Oh, and a very very very important fact: Renewable generation is almost entirely a one time cost, or one time every 30ish years on average. OPEX per kilowatt hour is dramatically lower than fossil fuels. In fact, today Europe imports 10 million barrels of crude oil a day, and at $100 a barrel (a number which will rise quite a bit in the coming months), Europe spends $1 Trillion every few years.
Europe's current energy spend is to buy an entire continent's worth of energy storage and just turn it into CO2 every few years. Every single day of crude oil import, Europe could instead pay for one of the Coire Glas model plants this article is doing the math with.
Storage is beyond feasible and will reduce energy costs.
Note: This article is about making wind energy constant over month long time scales, not about building enough storage to power Europe durably, so that explains some of it's misses, but also doesn't really explain much. The 2.1 TWh of storage it suggest would be enough to power all of Europe for 8 hours a day.
> this must be something with fast cold start. So black/brown coal power plan will not help you, similarly nuclear.
Nuclear plants provide base load and they are extremely fast at ramping up/lowering production. All modern nuclear plants are capable of changing power output at 3-5% of nameplate capacity per minute: https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2021-12...
You don't shut down power plants. None of the power plants ever do a "fast cold start"
> The end result now is that electricity in Europe is the most expensive on the World, so all manufacturing is moved to Asia
The production moved to Asia due to extremely cheap labor, not due to electricity costs.
5% per minute is not extremely fast. Simple cycle gas turbine (peaker) plants routinely go 0 to 100% in less than 10 minutes. Nuclear plants can only hit 5% per minute in the 50 to 100% interval (per your own source).
And all of this is confused by the way the nuclear industry uses the term "load following". You'd think it means "changing the power output from moment to moment to match electricity demand" but for nuclear plants it means "changing from one pre-planned constant level to another pre-planned constant level, up to four times per day".[0] There are only three[1] sources of electricity that can be ramped freely enough to exactly match demand: hydro, simple-cycle gas turbines and batteries. All electrical supplies will need some of those three mixed in. Which is why France is still 10% hydro and 10% natural gas in their electricity supply.
0: Some of the most modern Russian plants can move to +-20% of their current target at 10% per minute, but "the number of such very fast power variations is limited, and they are mainly reserved for emergency situations." per your source.
1: OK, there are some obsolete ways too, like diesel generators. At least obsolete at the scale of the electricity grid.
> 5% per minute is not extremely fast.
5% of nameplate capacity.
> You'd think it means "changing the power output from moment to moment to match electricity demand" but for nuclear plants it means "changing from one pre-planned constant level to another pre-planned constant level, up to four times per day"
Which is clearly invalidated by the very source I provided, and which you then somehow quote back at me.
> "the number of such very fast power variations is limited, and they are mainly reserved for emergency situations." per your source.
Imagine if you didn't omit the full quote/context:
--- start quote ---
Also, AES-2006 is capable of fast power modulations with ramps of up to 5% Pr per second (in the interval of ±10% Pr), or power drops of 20% Pr per minute in the interval of 50-100% of the rated power. However, the number of such very fast power variations is limited, and they are mainly reserved for emergency situations.
--- end quote ---
Oh look. What's limited is an actual emergency ramp up of 5% per second or power drops of 20% per minute.
Which is literally an emergency that is not needed in a power grid.
For the foreseeable future, building enough nuclear for peak capacity is exceedingly expensive.
> None of the power plants ever do a "fast cold start"
Somewhere in each grid you will have “black start” capacity contracts, dunno if nuclear can fills this role (or if grids exclude nukes for one reason or another).
Plenty of peaker plants built with the intention of running double digit hours per year and therefore the tradeoff supports being largely “off” in between those calls. Batteries might fill that gap.
> Nuclear plants provide base load and they are extremely fast at ramping up/lowering production
The obvious counterexample is Chernobyl, where a big contributor was the fact that they were unable to scale it down & back up as desired. Yes, nuclear reactors can scale down rapidly - but you have to wait several hours until it can scale back up!
Besides, the linked paper only covers load-following in a traditional grid (swinging between 60% and 100% once a day) and barely touches on the economic effects. The situation is going to look drastically different for a renewables-first grid, where additional sources are needed for at most a few hours a day, for a few months per year.
> You don't shut down power plants. None of the power plants ever do a "fast cold start"
Gas turbines can. Hydro can. Battery storage can.
The answer is you don't scale nuclear up or down, it's a silly waste of time and effort to even think about it. The fuel costs are effectively a rounding error, so running at 100% 24x7 is the only way to ever think about how nuclear should operate.
If you are going to curtail, you curtail other sources including solar and wind.
Nuclear fits quite well for the baseload you need. It's more expensive, but if you are going to need X capacity 24x7 and build nuclear, you simply build enough to provide just that plus perhaps a few extra for redundancy when another one goes offline. Then use gas peakers for the "oh shit" days difference between what nuclear is providing and solar was expected to but could not.
I don't understand the fascination folks have about nuclear not being able to following the grid. They don't need to, since they only ever remotely make sense when operated 24x7 at 100%. If you always have 1TW of grid usage every night during your lowest usage period - build that much nuclear as your starting point and figure out the rest from there. Nuclear's share of the total mix should be a straight line on a graph outside of plant shutdowns for maintenance.
> The obvious counterexample is Chernobyl,
You mean the obsolete design that is not used even in old reactors, not to say of modern designs?
Quote:
--- start quote ---
The minimum requirements for the manoeuvrability capabilities of modern reactors are defined by the utilities requirements that are based on the requirements of the grid operators. For example, according to the current version of the European Utilities Requirements (EUR) the NPP must at least be capable of daily load cycling operation between 50% and 100 % of its rated power Pr, with a rate of change of electric output of 3-5% of Pr per minute.
--- end quote ---
> The situation is going to look drastically different for a renewables-first grid, where additional sources are needed for at most a few hours a day, for a few months per year.
Ah, to live in these mythical times...
Can't beat a good turf fire though!
It's the best-smelling fire.
damn right
There's a declaration that a 915 MW power-plant was removed from the grid, and moved to emergency status only.
However, every other number in the piece is mentioned as some multiple of Wh's (GWh typically). That makes it very hard to tell what proportion of capacity was removed from the system as a proportion of the total generating capacity. I think the writer might have served us better with the use of some helpful percentage comparisons.
From the SEAI report (2024) (https://www.seai.ie/data-and-insights/seai-statistics/key-pu...)
- Electricity demand in Ireland was 32.9 TWh in 2024, up 4.1% on 2023-levels
- Commercial services, which includes the ICT sub-sector, accounted for 41.2% of electricity demand.
- The residential sector accounted for 25.5% of electricity demand in 2024.
- Data centres accounted for 21.2% of all electricity demand in 2024.
- Data centres account for 88.2% of the increase observed in Ireland’s electricity demand since 2015.
If I've done my math correctly, Moneypoint generates about 8TWh, if operating continuously; which it's probably not. Can we say 6-7 TWh?
That is not an insubstantial portion of the total.
AIUI it’s barely been operating for about a decade. Even before it closed (nearly a year ago; this is an old article), most days the eirgrid dashboard showed little or no coal in the mix.
Just last week they were talking about the future of Irelands energy generation, and the pressure between now and 2028 from data centers and EVs. Reopening moneypoint as a backup has been discussed. It's been kept as a oil fired backup station, but given the current surge in oil prices I could see it turning to coal again.
I really hope they just turn heavily toward renewables. We have enough offshore wind in Ireland to power most of the world, if we could just build enough turbines and harness it. We could become a net exporter of green power
I feel we’re framing it in a negative way
Our goal shouldn’t be to be coal free. Our goal should be to be 100% renewable.
If we set up our goals in terms of what we don’t want, we end up in the situation we are right now: high energy costs, very dependent on energy imports and a high risk of loosing our industry
> Our goal should be to be 100% renewable.
No, our goal is to reduce CO2 emissions as quickly as possible.
Shutting down coal plants is a quick and easy win, as pretty much every possible replacement is less polluting. It might even make sense to replace them with gas turbines: base load today, peaker plant tomorrow, emergency source later on.
Reducing is frivolous today. We will break through the tipping point in 2030. This will be the coolest century this millennium. There's no way to stop it. We needed to shut down emissions years ago. The only thing we can do proactively is invest in moon-shot tech such as fusion and ocean wave generation and wait for the planet to recover.
> This will be the coolest century this millennium.
While you are making predictions 975 years out, could we see your projected graph of human population? Time estimate for establishment of a permanent extraterrestrial colony?
No problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_population_projections
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_lunar_outpost_concepts#Ar...
I am not sure it's a matter of how you frame the issue, to be honest, although I have seen this argument used quite a lot.
100% renewables is the exact opposite of "100% non-renewables" and that's including also oil, gas, etc. So "coal" is only a part of the 100% non renewables, but it seems your goal is to get rid of all the non renewables.
And here the question is: why would you want a single goal? Why 100% renewable?
What drives us should be: save where it makes sense, don't where it doesn't. Iterate every 10 years and recheck.
All these single radical goals are literally killing our economy and society. And I am not just talking about coal free or renewable.
Even the "let's tear down the windfarms" is dumb because it's radical and non sense.
Or unrelated, even this "we need to digitalize everything" (although given our jobs we would profit the most) can lead to a lot of problems (privacy, security, etc).
I don't know why we have become so radical in the last 20 years.
> And here the question is: why would you want a single goal? Why 100% renewable?
Overlapping goals can coexist on varying time frames.
Setting aside nuclear (technically not "renewable", but also not carbon-based, and very energy dense) the goal is to stop releasing CO2 into the air from energy generation and return to pre-industrial levels.
This is because the surplus of CO2 generated so far has already caused clear and undeniable problems (not all of which are yet fully realized), and continued excess will only make things worse.
> What drives us should be: save where it makes sense, don't where it doesn't. Iterate every 10 years and recheck.
Solar is already economically competitive in many places and is expected to improve further.
Coal is about as dirty as it gets (besides peat and lignite). _Even if you were not reducing CO2 output_, getting rid of coal would be greatly beneficial as you'd reduce COPD and other lung diseases.
Coal is the worst of the fossil sources though. Getting rid of coal is only the first step but it's a good one.
China has 1200 of them, no doubt they will follow Ireland's noble lead
Well,
> The new analysis for Carbon Brief shows that electricity generation from coal in India fell by 3.0% year-on-year (46 terawatt hours, TWh) and in China by 1.6% (90TWh).
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-coal-power-drops-in-chi...
At 1.6% per year, how long until China closes its last power station do you think?
Seem to be on their way. Solar power is cheaper than coal now for some projects. In 10 years coal will be entirely obsolete. Though of course phase out will take longer
What projects is it cheaper for? And why will coal be obsolete in 10 years time?
What’s the alternative? Keep polluting the air?
Was Ireland's air particularly polluted?
The point isn't about Ireland specifically so don't get hung up on that. It's a general shift away from coal.
My point was completely about Ireland
So are China, generally shifting away from coal?
yes: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/china-...
do you have any other questions?
Yes, are China still building coal power stations? https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-why-china-is-still-bu...
Per your own source:
1. There are coordination issues that have caused them to overestimate the need for such plants, which have been running at low capacity. There have also been perverse incentives to build plants that weren't needed, in order to placate the relevant stakeholders.
2. Battery storage (including pumped hydro) is being pursued aggressively, specifically (among other things) to address the reliability concerns that motivated the recent new coal plant construction. Government policy, furthermore, is clearly focused on "new energy", i.e. not fossil fuels.
3. Coal power generation in China has been level or declining for a little while now. Generation from new renewable plants is outstripping the overall increase in demand for power. There is a graph titled "New coal power has no predictive value for future coal power generation".
4. Historical, global evidence shows a persistent trend of capacity reduction lagging behind generation reduction. As should be expected. It takes effort (= money) to decommission a power plant, and an inactive (or less-active) one is a safety net. "In most cases, what ultimately stopped new coal power projects in those countries was not a formal ban, but the market reality.... In China, the same market signals are emerging: clean energy is now meeting all incremental demand and coal power generation has, as a result, started to decline."
5. As a share of total power generation, coal power in China has dropped substantially (from nearly 3/4 to scarcely half) over the last decade or so. In absolute terms, it is likely near or even past the peak.
6. The article concludes: "While China’s coal power construction boom looks, at first glance, like a resurgence,it currently appears more likely to be the final surge before a long downturn. The expansion has added friction and complexity to China’s energy transition, but it has not reversed it."
You asked:
> So are China, generally shifting away from coal?
Your own source clearly argues that they are, in fact, shifting away from coal. Presenting an article that refutes you as if it supported you, while employing this style of repeated "pointed" questions, is disingenuous and obnoxious.
I think they meant China
There's a lot of misinformation and misunderstanding of the global energy supply presented around me nowadays. I would urge anyone to stop what they're doing and read "Clearing the Air" [1]. It's completely reshaped my understanding of this problem, and I am far more optimistic after reading it.
It addresses key questions such as "What about China?" and "Can we stop it?"
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/222768021-clearing-the-a...
Damn, and my country consumes 11 million out of 13 million tonnes of coal used for heating houses in the entire EU.
Tell me where you are from without telling me where you are from...
Poland I guess?
Ireland is a net energy importer who imports electricity from Great Britain. She, in turn, often imports from nations including France, Holland, and Denmark, who use coal power.
As such, it's not really the whole story to call Ireland, "coal-free". It's the same as America outsourcing heavy manufacturing or chemicals to China and claiming environmental victory. It's true in a narrow construction of the concept; it does reduce the burden on one's own country. It is false in the sense of one's contribution to the global commons and externalizes those externalities previously more internalized. It is, in other words, a shell game. Ireland's dependence on imported energy continues to rise and the number continues to tick up on the books of other nations and down on hers, with her people paying the "guilt premium" associated with this accounting trick. They're not exactly dirty grids, but the fact remains, Ireland still relies to some extent on coal.
Also note that, though she is building OCGTs and fast CCGTs elsewhere, she converted Moneypoint not to gas but to heavy fuel oil. HFO is quite dirty stuff, only a dozen or so per cent cleaner than the coal it replaces per Ireland's own EIS. This is likely influenced by the fact that the plant was specced to burn some of the cleaner thermal coal on the market, largely from Glencore's Cerrejon mine, with pretty low sulfur and ash relative to others. So, the delta from relatively clean coal (excuse the expression) to some of the dirtiest oil; large boilers like that are likely burning No. 5 or 6, aka bunker B or C in marine. Not sure if you've ever seen (or smelled) this stuff but it's the next thing from tar.
Ireland could instead have chosen to pull in gas from the North Sea and reduced the emissions of Moneypoint by not twelve but fifty to sixty per cent with modern CCGTs. Even older, more readily-available OCGTs would give thirty to forty per cent. This is ~250mmcf, i.e. probably a 24" spur line. Though this likely necessitates a few hundred km of loop for the ring main to the west, it's less than a year's work with a competent American crew.
Instead, she chose a paltry twelve per cent a few years earlier; when the other gas peaker capacity is installed, cooling infra and existing thermal plant talent base while paying to reconstitute all those on the other side of the island.
None of this is to say Ireland's work on decarbonizing her grid isn't real, but "coal-free" rather tends to obscure the present state of things; it is generally understood to make a strong, binary truth claim that isn't subject to "mostly" and implies one is no longer dependent on coal. It therefore demands consideration of electricity's fungibility in a grid.
Ireland is building the Celtic Interconnector with France next, will import a lot of her electricity from there which predominately uses nuclear power to generate her electricity. I fear you're making perfect the enemy of better and genuine progress.
https://www.eirgrid.ie/celticinterconnector
Ireland has lots of problems including energy generation but you're not being fair in citing significant progress having been made here.
I'm not the enemy of this progress at all and think it's a good thing. Same goes for the Celtic Interconnecter, though. My point is basically a) "coal-free" is misleading and this progress can be framed in other ways, and b) Ireland would have been better-served in terms of cost and environment to rely on even OCGTs than HFO.
Ireland imports less than 10% of it's electricity from the UK. The UK _already_ decommissioned it's coal-based eletricity production. The UK imports roughly 14% of it's electricity, and most of those imports are from nuclear and hydro-electric power.
Your entire comment is incredibly misleading.
No, it isn't. Power in a grid is fungible so grids operate based off consumption-based accounting. Britain continues to import at times from countries still burning coal. As such, Ireland is not free of coal dependence. It's really that simple. It is accurate for Ireland to say she no longer directly burns coal, no longer operates coal power, but the common understanding of "coal-free" is, "we are no longer directly dependent on coal for our lights to turn on." That simply isn't the case.
The way to think about this is, "If the grid had zero reserves and coal cut off, who could POSSIBLY go down?" You may figure this is constructed, but in a few days' dunkelflaute, Ireland needs her interconnects. Wind is then possibly low across much of Europe, meaning Holland and Germany ramp dispatchable capacity, including German lignite.
I saw nobody making those arguments. Most people were thinking that Ireland doesn't burn coal anymore. People who think or care about this stuff know that interconnects exist.
>[...]Denmark, who use coal power
Denmark has one coal fired power plant left, set to close in 2028.
https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/seneste/i-dag-lukker-og-slukker-et...
https://www.smartgriddashboard.com/roi/
Here is the dashboard for electricity in Ireland.
Ireland is not industrialised in a similar way to other EU countries like Germany or Italy which has lots of heavy manufacturing. Irish industry is mostly composed of US pharmaceuticals and data centres occupying much of the energy demand. There is a bauxite facility in limerick which does come to mind but that sort of thing isn't common in Ireland.
They might want to reopen it, oil prices spiked to $120 a few hours ago.
ironically it's been converted to run on Oil now, as a backup
A lot of these plants were built in the 70s-90s and were expected to run 40–50 years. Instead many are shutting early because renewables plus carbon pricing have simply made them uneconomical
Dirty power generation, and dirty toxic hazardous industry in general, discriminate against the poor and minorities. That carries an enormous social cost that goes uncounted in discussions like the ones on this thread.
Nuclear discriminates against capitalism. The cost makes the choice of nuclear irrational. The inability to insure nuclear in the private market makes it a travesty of free markets.
The top comment currently on this post is talking about the cost impacts being transferred to the poor and middle class with lots of discussion. I think people are well aware of and discuss the social impacts.
They discuss "social impacts" from the point of view that dirtier power is cheaper, supposedly, hypothetically, net of externalities, while ignoring the cost dirty power inflicts on the people living near the dirty power generation.
Meanwhile, Germany is killing it’s heat pump mandate, re-introducing gas and offsetting it with single percentage “green” gas greenwashing mandates.
Meanwhile China has 1200 of them - well done Ireland I'm sure they will follow your lead once they get around to it.
Definitely a step in the right direction, but believe it or not-- I overheard a customer in Aldi asking for coal only last week! I couldn't believe it, the staff member didn't know where to send them
Germany, meanwhile, having phased out nuclear power, now has to rely heavily on coal.
China opens a new coal plant or two every week.
Just in time for an energy crisis :-)
They'd be better off with (and are building out) offshore and onshore wind. If you've ever been to the west coast of Ireland you'll know they've got almost unlimited wind energy. The country is targeting 5GW of capacity by 2030 and 37GW in the distant future[1].
If only they could harness the power of rain, Ireland would truly be an energy superpower.
[1] https://www.irishtimes.com/special-reports/2025/10/30/winds-...
> If only they could harness the power of rain, Ireland would truly be an energy superpower.
I know this is in jest, but that's basically "dam up some valley rivers and put a hydroelectric generator on the end", and unfortunately Ireland isn't so good for that. (It's not just the physical geology, it's also all the people living in the places you'd flood).
Hydro as a battery is easier and works in far more locations, but that's not harnessing the power *of rain*.
But yes, Ireland and the UK have an absolutely huge wind power resource available around them, IIRC enough to supply all of Europe if the grid connections were there to export it all.
There has been a lot of proposals to dam up massive unpopulated sea-facing valleys in Mayo and Donegal and use pumped hydro with seawater. Was a bit topic 15 years ago, but never happened. All that happened was the silvermines pump hydro plant that seems behind schedule.
Prof Igor Shvets was behind this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_of_Ireland
Ireland briefly had the biggest hydroelectric dam in the world until the Hoover dam was built… but that was before electricity production really took off. Ireland doesn’t really have the geography for dams, the hills and rivers are far too small.
Are they selling to UK that AFAIU stopped building wind 10 years ago. Regulatory advantage...
You're mistaken.
Onshore wind in England was de-facto but not de-jure banned by the Tories in 2018, due to a footnote inserted in their National Planning Policy Framework. Labour removed this footnote in 2024, immediately after winning the election. [0]
Offshore wind was never affected, nor onshore wind in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland.
[0] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/policy-statement-...
Thanks, I was quite mistaken indeed! I wonder how much onshore England then affected the big picture.
Well, Tories would argue that you can't get the really big turbines onshore that you can offshore, so it doesn't really matter. Tiddly little turbines don't generate that much, and why spend lots of money on the planning process and fighting NIMBYs when you can generate it offshore?
However, it does matter, when looked at in whole with the need for capacity in the National Grid. A pile of turbines across SE England would have really helped, because a lot of the offshore wind and Scottish wind power has to be dumped, and gas generators fired up instead, due to lack of grid capacity to distribute that power across the country.
We should, of course, have completed upgrades to the grid by now, but they're late.
Here's a great article about "curtailment" as it's known: https://ukerc.ac.uk/news/transmission-network-unavailability...
Not only has the UK not stopped building wind, they have over 30GW of installed wind capacity and sell electricity to Ireland for most of the year.
The 'sell electricity to Ireland' bit here is doing an awful lot of work. It's more complicated than that.
For those who don't know, Ireland operates an all-island grid, and EirGrid (the grid operator for the Republic) owns SONI (the grid operator for Northern Ireland). That means that 'UK' and 'Ireland' in this has a large Northern Ireland shaped lump of ambiguity that statement.
It shouldn't be that complicated. The UK sells electricity to Ireland (and vice-versa?) in the same way that Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Denmark and Norway sell electricity to the UK, and vice-versa.
Don't tell me EirGrid's EWIC that comes onshore at Dublin and Greenlink at County Wexford are an "NI-shaped lump". They are sources of electricity for the whole island, when it's needed, just like the UK's interconnects with the continent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_high-voltage_transmiss...
> Are they selling to UK that AFAIU stopped building wind 10 years ago.
... Eh? No it didn't; not sure where you got that.
Ireland and the UK sell power to each other on a demand basis, though in practice Ireland is usually a net importer: https://www.smartgriddashboard.com/all/interconnection/?dura...
Uh? No they didn't stop at all?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_United_Kingd...
Tories during 2015-2023 made construction of new onshore wind farms all but impossible (removed subsidies and made planning permissions very difficult). I would assume Labor could reverse these polices but haven't seen anything in news about this.
Now you have: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/jul/08/... (2024)
Also https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/14/offshore...
Also https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/feb/10/uk-onshore-...
And a lot of offshore was constructed during that period.
So still claiming that we didn't build any wind power was false.
Maybe the difference is made up by renewables and not oil?
Natural gas is still the leader by a good margin.
Leading is not the same as replacing. See this figure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Ireland#/media/File:...
In 2000, coal was about 20% of the energy mix, gas another 20%, oil about 50%. Wind was 0%. In 2024 coal was about 2%, gas still 20%, oil still 50%, but wind grew to about 15%. It seems that wind actually replaced coal. It is not only logical, but good, that wind first replaced coal (dirtiest), and maybe from now on is will start to replace oil. Only after many decades, or maybe never, gas will be replaced.
I'm not sure where that data comes from. Oil was only around 3% in 2024.
https://www.seai.ie/data-and-insights/seai-statistics/electr...
Primary energy compared to electricity as energy. The first adds energy used in driving, chemical industry etc. the second is just the amount of electricity generated.
Got it, thanks. So, not for grid electricity, as in this discussion.
Still, in the second figure of your link, you can see how gas is more or less stable since the start in 2005, and coal + peat is being slowly replaced almost 1:1 by renewables, mainly wind as hydro is stable and solar is marginal in Ireland.
Presumably it's also counting non-electricity energy generation. Road and rail transport still relies heavily on internal combustion engines.
energy vs electricity. oil is a much bigger part of the energy mix due to chemical manufacturing
No, it's not?
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/interactive-publications/e...
(2023 numbers)So natural gas was just barely more than renewables in 2023, but according to the source below the line was crossed in 2025 and renewables now provide more than all fossil fuels put together:
https://electrek.co/2026/01/21/wind-and-solar-overtook-fossi...
For those following along at home, it appears enir is (edit: as well as using EU wide data, not Irish data..) including non-electricity generation, or non-grid, energy use. Grid stats available here https://www.seai.ie/data-and-insights/seai-statistics/electr...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47308462
Yeah, I think I was a little confused by the context of another thread and did not realize this one was about Ireland specifically.
Not sure what the downvotes are about, that looks to be exactly what happened.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
It isn’t.
Ireland has essentially no working oil power generation capacity these days (I think the only ones are a couple of small diesel units on islands, which are not even connected to the national grid). Moneypoint was replaced with some combo of wind, gas and imports.
(Moneypoint was actually built originally due to Ireland's over dependence at the time on oil for power generation; after the oil crisis, initially ESB attempted to build a nuclear plant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnsore_Point#Cancelled_nucle...), but it was such a political minefield that it was canceled, leading to Moneypoint.)
Oil stayed more or less steady, so yes, it did.
I think this is very strategically stupid decision (or crime committed by high management). Those should be preserved and be ready for use in case things go south which is not inconceivable judging by what is happening around
Am am not against "saving planet" etc. Just make sure you still have a way to survive if high tech fails. Same as with let's abolish all cash without thinking what a nightmare it can / will cause one day
From the article: the Moneypoint plant will continue to serve a limited backup role, burning heavy fuel oil under emergency instruction from Ireland’s transmission system operator EirGrid until 2029.
I understand that American shale gas (the largest fraction of LNG imports to the EU) is by certain measures as polluting as coal. If correct, Europe needs to reconsider if the price (and political) volatility is really worth it.
Meanwhile the Trumpo US puts "clean" in front of the word coal and that's about it.
In another news China opens n-new coal plants. All this greenwashing is a farce until import from non-green countries are banned
Except they don't turn on those new coal plants all the time, they use them as peakers. You know, when the sun is not shining and wind is not blowing.
Highest[1] base electricity price in the EU, some of the worst conditions for solar generation, a war in Iran, and now they've closed the coal plant. Great. Guess I'll just go bankrupt.
Edit: instead of downvoting my post, feel free to pay my electric bill, lol
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
Moneypoint was barely operating for about the last decade, and was closed almost a year ago (this is an old article).
(June 2025)
I always wondered why someone decides to post something fairly old, as this is 'not really news' given it is so old.
Because they somehow stumbled upon the article, thought it was interesting, and submitted it, not necessarily looking at the date?
It's not that old in the context of energy generation which operates over years and decades.
It is old in context of an event happening and we are being informed of it a year later, regardless of how 'slow moving' the underlying thing is.
It's new to me. Also is not even a year old, should we only allow info from the last week?
Not everyone is supposed to read every single news. There will always be someone who didn't see it, but that is not my point.
It would feel weird to see this as a headline on a newspaper or on TV today, but maybe that is just me and people like to read new that are from last year.
Suicidal move, Europe wide.
Once they see the oil rising this week plans will be shut down till new notice.
This happened almost a year ago. Ireland has no normal oil generation capacity (ironically moneypoint has been retained as an emergency-only oil burning plant til 2030, but it would generally only be used in this capacity as an emergency measure when gas plants unexpectedly go down).
Germany on the other hands..
I'm not sure it's fair to give Germany too much grief on this front. They are actively destroying their industrial base in a desire to hit net-zero.
...has been massively reducing its usage of coal (down almost 40% since 2011) and committed to phase it out entirely by 2038.
Meanwhile China and India are building out coal plants at record pace
China is deploying more nuclear and solar than anyone, and their coal use actually went down last year.
India is still developing and per capita uses a fraction of the western world.
But globally solar and battery use are exploding. We really are living in the green revolution that was so talked about in the 90's and 2000's
China is building solar panels at a record pace, and building wind turbines at a record pace, and building nuclear power plants at a record pace. Meanwhile, the construction rate of coal plants has been dropping over the last decade and a half.
Classic lie by omission. Or you're only reading right-wing media, in which case you can learn something and stop repeating this nonsense.
In 2024 88% of new electricity in China came from renewables. https://www.eia.gov/international/analysis/country/chn
They build new coal plants as a backup, or to replace existing older plants. But they're very clearly not using them more than they already were. They burn coal because they have coal, just like the US burns gas because the fracking boom made gas cheap.
India is not doing as well as China but it is still improving. In 2024 64% of electricity growth came from coal, but that's down from 91% in 2023. https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/india/
I think they'll follow China's lead soon. The economics are inevitable. Ember projects India will be at 42% renewable electricity by 2030, up from 10% today. This is obviously staggering renewables growth in a poor country.
The same source projects the US will be at 59% by then https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/united-states... and it's already at 58% today. So basically 0 renewables growth in the richest country in the world.
Both India and China lack oil. Reducing fossil fuel usage is a national security issue for them. They're also poorer. As solar and wind become the cheapest sources of electricity, thanks mostly to China, they're going to rapidly transition. No dumb political games.
Unclear to me why you've been downvoted here. The data clearly shows that China is taking more serious action on this issue than any other developed or developing economy.
I didn't downvote (as the information is correct and relevant) but I flagged. Accusing others up front of lying, or of being motivated by various political outgroup boogeymen, is not on.
It's not greyed out for me, either.
It's pretty clear to me. China and India are convenient boogeymen for climate change deniers and fossil fuel shills.
China is not - Chinas coal consumption is stagnating with about zero growth from 2024 to 2025.
China is far more serious than the EU about the green transition. Despite being poorer than the poorest EU country they are dominating renewable deployment.
I think that attitude is poorly informed whataboutism.
Interestingly, per capita, china is worst than EU, and will be way worst in 10 years.
Try produce everything yourself and then call it coal-free