Ireland shuts last coal plant, becomes 15th coal-free country in Europe (2025)
pv-magazine.com714 points by robin_reala 9 hours ago
714 points by robin_reala 9 hours ago
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.
> 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.
Coal is neither cheap nor abundant in Ireland.
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
Like fossil fuels are somehow ecologically clean and don't cause massive deforestation themselves? Sure, renewables aren't a silver bullet and there's a real conversation to be had about proper disposal of turbine blades and PV cells, but it's pretty convenient how that same scrutiny never seems to get applied to fossil fuels.
Is your point that coal mining, transport, and usage have no negative externalities?
What is the balsawood comment in reference to? I’ve never heard that mentioned in conversation around renewables but it’s not my area of expertise.
Coal is cheap and abundant in the English Midlands, which explains much of the industrial revolution starting there.
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.
Coal was abundant. British coal was mined out. The coal that is left isn’t economical to mine.
The UK's deep mines would be spectacularly uneconomic. Some have been sealed permanently (for expensive values of permanent) and the supporting knowledge and infrastructure would have to be rebuilt.
Coal makes as much sense as a modern fuel as horse drawn buses do for transport.
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.
Rankine cycle efficiency can be up to 45%; monocrystalline solar panels ~25%? I suppose you aren't paying for the sunshine, but if cloudy days affected coal power, James Watt wouldn't be famous.
If you're going to make that comparison, you need to compare apples-to-apples and include solar efficiency in the coal too. After all coal's energy originally came from the sun. Plants converted the sunlight into energy at an efficiency of about 1%. A miniscule fraction of that energy went into the plant growth, and then a miniscule fraction of that energy was captured when the plant was converted into coal.
Luckily solar panels work for 30+ years while coal works for only as long as you burn it. You can also recycle solar panels, but try reversing entropy to get your coal back and you’ll see what’s up. Cloudy days are solved by wind, ocean energy, geothermal, storage, etc.
> 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.
> 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's because of the rules of the European Energy Market where all electricity has to be as expensive as the most expensive source.
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.
> rules of the European Energy Market where all electricity has to be as expensive as the most expensive source.
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.
> 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.
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, 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.
A nuke plant is concrete, pumps, fuel storage and (re)processing, a huge pressure vessel, some very complex moderator machinery, and some of the most complex industrial plant control on the planet.
Even if you ramped down the safety, it still wouldn't be cheap or simple.
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.
Your link is from a disreputable source though. Their literal purpose is to gaslight people.
| 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.
They are the same side of the coin but one has a much larger effect then the other. Energy has always been expensive in Ireland and home insulation poor (though there have been lots of grants)
| NIMBY-ism.
True but it effects are much worse due to poor planning laws
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 actually fine in theory but it's nearly impossible to build anything in Ireland due to the way the planning laws work.
In an ideal situation we would be seeing a ramp up in production of all types to take advantage of the costs.
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.
Renewables run on competent government.
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.
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.
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.
[flagged]
> 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.
Believe it or not, you're both correct! China is closing more (old, inefficient, polluting) coal plants than anybody else, and opening newer ones than anybody else.
> "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-...
It’s a 50 day old account making, as you pointed out, factually incorrect claims.
Just assume it’s a clanker or propagandist and flag it imo
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
> 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.
> 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!
> 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
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.
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.
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...
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.
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
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.
Coal is the most expensive form of power still widely used and it's not even close.
Coal is literally just bad. It's hard as hell to transport, it's extremely inefficient to burn, and it produces a shit ton of harmful byproducts you have to clean up.
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.
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)
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.
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.
Yes, there are many problems with the planning process, but as you conceded in another comment, the actual reason that we don't have an LNG terminal is that Eamonn Ryan nixed the possibility.
As usual with the Greens, perfection was the enemy of the good.
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-...
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
Cheap energy from coal is very expensive energy. Who’s going to clean up the pollution? Carbon capture uses a lot of energy
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
On the one hand there are scientists who say it is happening.
On the other hand there are sock-puppets for oil billionaires who say it isn't happening.:
"Established in 2015, the CO2 Coalition is dedicated to “educating thought leaders, policy makers, and the public about the important contribution made by carbon dioxide to our lives and the economy.” The Coalition has received funding from the Koch brothers — the right-wing libertarian U.S. oil billionaires who have been at the heart of climate change denial in the United States"
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.
> 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.
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.
No.
Our biggest interconnect is with France which is 72% nuclear. Currently importing 3GW from them.
Our second biggest is with Norway which is 88% hydroelectric. Currently importing 1.7GW from them.
We're importing 0.2GW from Belgium which is partly gas and partly nuclear.
We're exporting power to Ireland, The Netherlands and Denmark.
Imports is 6-7% of current UK grid power. Most of our power comes from us burning North Sea gas.
[2] https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/live/fifteen_minutes
In this thread: the rich, unaffected class instruct the poor that their plight is in fact a fabrication. History really does repeat itself.
The longer we put off solving climate change, the more expensive it is going to be for the poor and middle-classes.
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.....
The bigger issue might be whether the transition is being managed in a way that protects consumers
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.
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Their comment is kinda nonsense, tho. Every single lump of coal burned in Moneypoint over its operating life was imported. We don't have significant coal reserves, and Moneypoint was designed from the start to run on imported coal; it does not even have a railway link.
Their comment is talking about a wider context than this single coal power station.
In the UK, Net Zero politics means we are killing our own North Sea fossil fuel extraction, only to purchase North Sea fossil fuel from Norway, at an increased environmental (and financial) cost.
That's the kind of political lunacy the OP is aluding to.
Okay, but do you have any examples of such alleged lunacy in Ireland? Ireland has no economically exploitable oil or coal, and what gas there is is largely exhausted.
You should been smart enough with your bags of IQ to already see this.
For Ireland, it's not so much the sourcing of fossil fuels, but the imposition of political taxes on fossil fuels onto consumers.
About 50% of the retail price of petrol in Ireland is tax (excise + carbon + VAT).
Overall fuel taxation in Ireland is ~50%, compared to 15-20% in the US. Although to be fair, most of Europe is doing the same thing to its population (during a cost of living crisis).
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Ireland's population has still not exceeded its high point before the potato famine and the mass export of the population.
Ireland isn't importing most of its population. Have you been scrolling social media too much? You know anyone can write anything they want on there, right? Lol
Just for the record, neither of these things is suicidal. There are many prosperous countries importing energy and allowing foreigners to settle. Probably even most of them.
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You did not provide any fact supporting the 'suicidality' of anything, or even any definition of 'suicidality'. Also narrowly defined ethnicities are not humans, they cannot commit suicide.
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
2016: Belgium
2020: Sweden, Austria
2021: Portugal
2024: United Kingdom
2025: Ireland
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> Never used coal power: Albania, Cyprus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Switzerland, Norway
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."
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.
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.
Iceland (never used coal to my knowledge) is missing from the list.
Iceland's situation - tiny population, geothermal paradise - may be difficult for 99% of the world's countries to replicate.
> 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.
What a lot of people also miss is that we’re in the age demographic bomb, where the global population is both aging rapidly and declining at the same time I.e. japanification
This means that global consumption will decline too which coincides with both factories and power plants shutting down
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.
>The population and demands of China are growing
The population of China has been decreasing since 2022.
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=population+of+china+is+decr...
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.
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?
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.
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
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
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.