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
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...
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.
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: MontenegroTo 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.
https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?cha...
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.
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
> 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...
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.
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.
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
Edit: instead of downvoting my post, feel free to pay my electric bill, lol
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
Definitely wrong - Malta has used coal power for example. See for example:
https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/power-and-energy/mal...
"In 1979, a second oil crisis, this time due to the Iranian Revolution, again brought into question Malta’s energy policy and made the government seek alternatives. Between 1982 and 1987, four stream turbines were installed at the Marsa Power Station. This strategy could have worked if the environmental and human health impacts of the coal used at the power station had not caused the local population to protest. In 1987, construction of a new power plant, at Delimara, started; the plant was commissioned in 1994. In the meantime, the Marsa Power Station continued to be improved, with new turbines added to eliminate the use of coal. On January 12, 1995, Malta became independent of coal but consequently became fully dependent on oil."
For most practical purposes, Swedish electricity generation has been basically fossile free since the 1980's.
Poland I guess?
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.
Your entire comment is incredibly misleading.
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...
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-...
India has vast coal reservers, and is the second largest producer in the world, whereas they aren't a major oil producer. Hence they use coal. Similar with China.
If the story was about some country shutting down their last natural gas plant instead of their last coal plant, no doubt someone would be pointing out that meanwhile the US is increasing natural gas production at a record pace.
In 2025 the US added 7 GW of natural gas electricity capacity, and India added 7 GW of coal. Natural gas generates about 1/2 the CO2 as coal, but India has over 4x the population, so the US added about twice as much new emissions per capita.
But we also need to consider how much renewables were added. That will be part of point #3.
2. India's emissions are 2 tons per year per capita, which is under 1/2 of the global average, which is about 1/3 the EU average, 1/5 of China, and 1/7 of the USA. Even if it takes them longer to get off fossil fuels than the other large countries they are likely to never come near the emissions levels per capita of those other countries.
3. They are actually making better progress at this than most others. 50% of electricity used in India is renewable, compared to 25% in the US, 40% in China, and 47% in the EU.
They are not just adding coal. They are adding wind and solar at record paces too. In 2025 they added around 7 GW of coal capacity last year, 38 GW of solar, and 6 GW of wind.
The US is doing the same, but with natural gas rather than coal. 7 GW of natural gas, 25 GW of solar, 13 GW of wind. About the same percentage of renewables (~90%) as India.
4. Yes, per capita is the correct measure, because the atmosphere is very efficient at distributing CO2 emitted anywhere to everywhere. A ton of CO2 has the same impact no matter where it is emitted. Unless you can make a good argument that some people have some sort of natural or divine right to a bigger share of whatever CO2 budget we decide Earth can afford, it has to be per capita.
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
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.
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.
> 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
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.
I mean, the UK proudly trumpets that they're coal-free, while entertaining a new coking coal mine.
It seems they consider only coal use in the 21st century in mainland Europe + UK (i.e. not Greenland, Iceland, Svalbard, etc.).
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.
https://progressireland.substack.com/p/irish-electricity-is-...
As of 2025, the cheapest levelized cost of energy is solar ($58), onshore wind ($61), and gas combined ($78).
Although the data is US-based, European prices likely follow a similar pattern.
[0] https://www.lazard.com/media/5tlbhyla/lazards-lcoeplus-june-...
But the simple matter is thought that the economics of nuclear power simply are not delivering. They are expensive and slow to build, while at the same time wind (particularly off shore wind) and solar are getting cheaper and easier to build every year (or month even). Germany also stands out as a success story of nuclear phase-out, that by replacing these expensive to run nuclear power plant has offered the economic wiggle room to phase in renewables a lot faster then otherwise.
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.
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.
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.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
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.
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.
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...
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 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.
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.
The huge energy price spikes are down to wars in Ukraine (gas, which is also used for electricity production) and the Middle East.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Electric power—469.9 MMst—91.7%
Industrial total—41.9 MMst—8.2%
Industrial coke plants—16.0 MMst—3.1%
Industrial combined heat and power—10.1 MMst—2.0%
Other industrial—15.8 MMst—3.1%
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
(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.)
... 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...
Prof Igor Shvets was behind this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_of_Ireland
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.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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'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.
Talk about ill informed.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/interactive-publications/e...
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:
https://electrek.co/2026/01/21/wind-and-solar-overtook-fossi...
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-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_United_Kingd...
It's not greyed out for me, either.
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.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/images/th...
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
there are 2-2.5x times differences between highest and lowest, of 25-30 countries
And here is some current/future (??) prices/increases, which i have no idea where they come from:
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.
| NIMBY-ism.
True but it effects are much worse due to poor planning laws
In no other industry are providers ever worried about selling too much.
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.
"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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
> being motivated by various political outgroup boogeymen
If OP wasn't lying then they were misinformed. I made reasonable guesses to the source of that misinformation. I didn't attribute any political motives to OP themselves.
I don't see how "right-wing" or "right-wing media" is an "outgroup". And it isn't a boogeyman because the majority of the "climate change is fake but it's China's fault anyway" opinion pieces come from there.
Did you also flag OP's lies/propagation of incorrect information? If you did, I appreciate your consistency and fair-mindedness. If you didn't, then why not? What's worse - lies/propagating ignorance or being slightly curt?
Btw OP told this same lie 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47282625 and was corrected by someone else. They are clearly not a good faith poster.
Moneypoint in County Clare, Ireland, joins the ranks of other European nations exiting coal by shutting off power generation at its sole remaining coal plant. Industry observers say Ireland’s increased renewable energy generation in recent years, particularly in wind, has contributed to this milestone. Moneypoint now functions as a backup oil burner under emergency instruction, but it is no longer active in the wholesale electricity market.
June 20, 2025

ESB Moneypoint Generation Station
Image: Charles W Glynn, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
Ireland today (June 20) became the 15th coal-free country in Europe, having ended coal power generation at its 915 MW Moneypoint coal plant in County Clare. Initially commissioned in the mid-1980s by ESB, Moneypoint was intended to help Ireland offset the impact of the oil crises in the 1970s by providing a dependable source of energy.
But with Ireland now generating a lot more renewable energy nowadays, coal burning is no longer such an urgent need. Energy think tank Ember data states Ireland generated 37% (11.4 TWh) of its electricity from wind in 2024. Solar is not near wind levels of generation, (0.97 TWh in 2024) but it has been continuously breaking generation records in recent months and local stakeholders are confident this positive trend will continue.
Following the closure, 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.
This strategy is in line with previous plans made by EirGrid and ESB to exit coal-fired generation by the end of 2025, which stipulated that Moneypoint would no longer be active in the wholesale electricity market.
“Ireland has quietly rewritten its energy story, replacing toxic coal with homegrown renewable power,” said Alexandru Mustață, campaigner on coal and gas at Europe’s Beyond Fossil Fuels.
“But this isn’t ‘job done’. The government’s priority now must be building a power system for a renewable future; one with the storage, flexibility, and grid infrastructure needed to run fully on clean, domestic renewable electricity,” Mustață warned.
Jerry Mac Evilly, Campaigns Director at Friends of the Earth Ireland, appealed to the government to ensure oil backup at Moneypoint is kept to an absolute minimum and ultimately decommissioned. He also appealed for the government to prevent further development of data centers, which he said are increasing Ireland’s reliance on fossil gas.
“We also can’t ignore that the government is targeting the installation of at least 2 GW of gas power plants with no strategy to reduce Ireland’s dangerous gas dependency,” he added.
On a broader level, Ireland’s step to close coal power generation at Moneypoint sets a precedent for further European countries’ coal exits to come, says Beyond Fossil Fuels. The group tracks European countries' progress on their commitments to switching from fossil fuels to renewable energy. So far, 23 European countries have committed to coal phase-outs. Italy is expected to complete its mainland coal phase-out this summer with the upcoming closure of its last two big coal power plants, while mainland Spain is also expecting to declare itself coal-free this summer.
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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.
They have more coal power plants planned and your data hickup worked out during recensions and covid.
No it's not. I'm not talking about the environment either, coal plants are just straight-up more expensive than gas plants and renewables.
Coal plants are necessarily steam turbines and not internal combustion, because coal is filthy and the mercury/sulfur/etc would wreck the guts of any machinery it goes through. Thus, it's only used to boil water.
Gas turbines don't have that problem, so they spin the turbine with the combustion products directly. They're far more efficient, the machines are smaller and cheaper, and because you don't need to wait for a giant kettle to boil before ramping up the power, they're far more flexible and responsive to demand. It also helps that the gas is fed with a gas pipe, whereas coal needs to be fed with a bobcat.
Which is why nobody is building new coal plants - they're way more expensive than gas plants, even if the gas fuel itself is more expensive than coal.
Coal is neither cheap nor abundant in Ireland.
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...
Nuclear defeats coal in all of these aspects, aside from the high upfront cost.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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've only so many shits to give, and people heating their homes doesn't rank.
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.
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.
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)
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?
https://www.seai.ie/data-and-insights/seai-statistics/electr...
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.
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.
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...
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.
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 ]
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...
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.
Not even then. Coal is dead, and gas killed it. The externalities are a distraction, coal plants are just straight-up uneconomic.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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...
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...
So still claiming that we didn't build any wind power was false.
- 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.
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.
...except China, who is building coal plants at a pace never seen in history. Are they dumb, or...?
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.
Said collieries, which if put back into service, would be able to cheaply get coal to Ireland via barge at no great cost or latency.
But sure, nuclear is cheap if you ignore all those things.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
do you have any other questions?
This means that global consumption will decline too which coincides with both factories and power plants shutting down
Coal requires transport and extraction which are both pretty expensive processes.
In my home town of ~300 people, there was just a couple of houses which used coal for heating. That's because sourcing and transporting coal was quiet expensive.
Electric heating was much more common. Even the old expensive baseboard resistive heaters.
When we talk about extreme rural areas, what you end up finding is solar and batteries end up being the most preferred energy sources. This has been true for decades. That higher upfront cost is offset by not having to transport fuel.
It's why you'll find a lot of cabins in pretty remote locations are ultimately solar powered. This is long before the precipitous price drop of solar.
The population of China has been decreasing since 2022.
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=population+of+china+is+decr...
[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
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.
Apso not sure if you are including coal mining, and all of the deaths and negative health outcomes as a result of the industry
And people are (mostly irrationally) terrified of it, which matters in democracies.
And off course societal (and geopolitical) acceptance issues.
What is your point?
In an ideal situation we would be seeing a ramp up in production of all types to take advantage of the costs.
If you don't have competent government, that's not the fault of renewables.
This is not snark. With forward-looking rational planning the transition could have started decades ago, and we could have had a low carbon energy economy by 2010 at the latest.
But fossils make so much money they can buy the policy they want, and here we are arguing about national tactics instead of planetary strategy.
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?
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.
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.
I guess we need a new planet when we're done filling it with junk and have depleted all the rain forest etc
Coal makes as much sense as a modern fuel as horse drawn buses do for transport.
Me too! That was a lot of work, and surprisingly hard to stack.
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.
https://www.eirgrid.ie/news/new-record-wind-energy-all-islan...
In February 2026, 48% of energy used was generated from renewable sources, of which the vast majority (41% of energy use) was wind:
https://www.eirgrid.ie/news/almost-50-electricity-came-renew...
(The previous February was slightly better with 54% renewable and 48% wind)
https://www.eirgrid.ie/news/renewables-powered-over-half-ele...
How'd that work out?
If you build more solar it'll meet 100% of demand for a larger portion of the day, which is what we're doing.
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/selling-coal-for-domestic-use-in...
No economy on the planet needs 24/7 peak power production. The times humans work correspond nicely with the times the sun is out.
So as soon as Germany lights up their gas powerplants, that follow gas prices (wars, etc), French nuclear electricity has to be sold for the same price.
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.
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.
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.
If you want solar PV to help with AGW, they must be sited somewhere with an solar albino > .25. That's about Barcelona in Europe and SF in the US. If you put solar PV somewhere with less sun, you are actually making AGW worse.
https://www.usitc.gov/publications/332/executive_briefings/e...
Are you talking about the marginal cost? Don't blame the govt, blame the economics textbook.
You're comparing the cost for coal as baseload to the cost for natural gas as a peaker plant. When using both for baseload, natural gas is cheaper than coal and emits less CO2.
Meanwhile renewables are cheaper than both until they represent enough of the grid that you have to contend with intermittency:
https://www.ourworldofenergy.com/images/electrical-power-gen...
Which doesn't happen until it gets close to being a majority of generation, and which most countries aren't at yet so can add more without incurring significant costs for firming.
In other words, the currently cheapest way to operate a power grid, if that's all you care about, is to have something like half renewables and half natural gas. Add some nuclear -- even just, don't remove any -- and CO2 goes down by a lot because then you're only using natural gas for peaking/firming instead of baseload, while still having costs in line with historical norms.
The obviously bad thing many places are doing is shutting down older power plants without building enough new capacity in anything else to meet existing demand, and then prices go up. But that's not because you're using e.g. solar instead of coal, it's because you're trying to use demand suppression through higher prices instead of coal. It's easy to get rid of coal as long as you actually build something else.
We appreciate your restraint.
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?
Or, as Homer Simpson famously put it..."I dunno; Internet?"
But seriously, there's no significant recycling of solar panels, coal extraction is a known process, and good luck running an industrial economy exclusively on renewables.
aren't all/most electricity market working this way (pricing based on marginal price, aka pay-as-clear)?
pay-as-bid has other potential issues and might not be better.
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.
This has made me remember having to go out to the coal shed and fill up a brass bucket and then come back in all covered in coal dust.
I've not thought about That Smell in years!
There’s the direct answer to your question, cost of installed grid battery storage are getting cheaper by the user and it’s completely viable option at present. It’s not some vague fantasy idea like power plants in space or something, just look at California’s energy mix during peaks that in just a few years has become dominated by solar+batteries.
For longer periods of low-sun in a climate like Ireland see the other renewable options he mentioned. Plus a couple natural gas plants for fallback that can comfortably sit idle until needed.
If some combo of renewables are used 90% of the time when possible, no one is going to be mad about modern clean-burning LNG plants compared to a toxic, expensive relic of the past like coal.
Current trends make it clear the future will be renewables, grid battery storage, and however many natural gas plants are needed for reliability based on local climate (plus keeping nuclear online if you already have it). And that “future” is pretty much here already in places like California.
The fundamental issue with electricity markets is that they cannot rely on any signal other than the electricity price to control whether a given plant will be running at a given time or not.
I think a real alternative would be to set-up an entity charged with negotiating prices with the electricity producers (which would also be a sort of partial reversal on the whole market thing in a lot of countries).
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.
Even if you ramped down the safety, it still wouldn't be cheap or simple.
Industrial control systems are fundamentally sensors, actuators and a computer. None of those is actually that expensive. Nobody should be paying a billion dollars for a valve.
Older reactors have somewhat high operating costs because they're so old, many of them were built more than half a century ago. Newer reactors often have higher costs because of the lack of scale. If you only build one or two of something you have to amortize the development costs over that many units, mistakes that require redoing work are being made for the first time, etc. Build more of them and the unit cost goes down.
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?
Nuclear power is expensive, enough that “what about night” is solve by building extra solar and batteries. Also, renewables wreck the economics of base load power that needs to run all the time to pay back loan, but can’t compete with solar during the day.
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.
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...
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.
I was going to ask you 3-4 questions but then I searched them upon myself and I do think that the results are more (positive?) than I thought.
Solar could feed world's energy needs by 0.3% and I think that Excess Solar could be used for green Hydrogen etc. too when needed for burstable energy source and smart grids in general to fix the ramp-up/ramp-down problem
I think one of the only things that I was sort of worried about mainly was the fact that Batteries produce lots of Co2 emissions and harm to the planet when mined but it seems that they have lifespan of about 10 years and can be carbon negative 3-4 years.
I don't know, I go through waves of doubt over Solar. I might need to learn more about Solar because I feel like I can just agree to whatever side I hear the recent data's from. Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics it seems.
But I feel like although solar is right direction too, we probably need smarter grids and just improvements within grid infrastructure in general too. Another point about Solar could be that there can be a more personal adoption of it whereas I can't build my own nuclear power plant so I do agree with you.
I'd still say that there is a lot of greenwashing in the Climate Change community to treat wood-chips and trees as fuel source and all the problems that stem from that with timber industry.
So although there are short-comings in Solar given its intermittent nature. I do agree that unless Govt.s create nuclear, it could be a good bet for personal actions/ even Govt.s to diversify at the very least from Oil.
I still think that though there is something wrong where People are wrongfully worried about nuclear. India for example had 3% of its energy coming from Nuclear and I looked at wiki and we planned even more but anti nuclear protests started happening after Fukushima Disaster :(
I am still really interested about Thorium Reactors and the race towards building it though. They are mostly disaster-free and Indian in particular has quite a large reserve of Thorium (25% of the world supply). The govt. is working on making 100GW to raise thorium's ratio in energy to almost ~10% estimate from 3% till 2047 which would still be impressive given that total energy would skyrocket as well till then.
India has true chances of being Energy Independent long term if it focuses on nuclear and Solar both rather than focusing on Solar given any advancement in Thorium reactor will be huge for us. For reference Coal : Thorium power ratio for same mass is 1:3.5 Million and its even more efficient than Uranium.
Also Thorium cannot be used for Nuclear Bombs in the sense of a fission unless you drop it at someone complete point blank but at that point its worthless compared to missiles so we can genuinely share this technology all across the world.
Thorium Reactors long term feel the future to me. So maybe I am too bullish on Thorium.
Solar is nice but atleast personally, Investments in Thorium Reactors could make India Energy Independent given 25% of the supply. We also recently found a huge jackpot in lithium and other minerals in Kashmir recently so I suppose long term India can be sovereign in manufacturing batteries for Solar production as well.
There is such a massive possibility in nuclear especially more so for India and general consensus also being within Scientific community that nuclear energy is cleanest forms of energy. The Combination means that, I'd want my govt. to take some risks in nuclear research/projects given how big the reward can be and that's also why I vocally support Nuclear. Much more than Solar. But I'd say that any govt. has their own risk profile and maybe Solar can be boring but works technology for Energy Independence so I just hope that Solar & Thorium both show some good numbers long term as well. So it isn't as if I am anti Solar as much as I am very pro nuclear energy long term.
Relevant Video: Thorium Reactors: Why is this Technology Quite So Exciting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSFo_92cJ-U