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: MontenegroDefinitely 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."
I should also note it is primarily a gas plant, fuelled by extremely cheap (nearly free) gas subsidised by Russia. It only falls back to coal when supply is disrupted, which happened when Ukraine stopped transiting Russian gas on its territory.
Arguably, they are a particularly big problem to Moldovans because Russia's military is funded by greenhouse gas emissions.
It is technically still considered Moldova by everyone else so it's not differentiated in documents from the EU and the likes.
For most practical purposes, Swedish electricity generation has been basically fossile free since the 1980's.
Specifically in district heating, 87% of the forestry-sourced fuel is unrefined wood products. Almost half of it is just bark, branches and treetops. Of all the biomass in an average mature tree logged in Sweden, 43% ends up as pulpwood, 43% as saw timber, 8% gets burned for fuel and the remaining 6% is treetops and branches which also tend to end up burned for fuel.
There is definitely a lot of debate in Sweden about sustainable forestry practices, though. The industry really wants to clearcut everything for convenience, but it's really bad for biodiversity and the general public hates it.
Source: the report Hållbarare biobränsle i fjärrvärmesektorn, Energiforsk 2023; specifically the charts on pages 14 and 15. Link: https://energiforsk.se/media/33316/2023-979-ha-llbarare-biob...
Addendum: I believe there's also been some studies and experiments involving importing olive pits from the Mediterranean olive oil industry for burning in district heating plants, but I don't think it's been done at scale.
It makes more sense to leave trees in the ground than burning them to generate energy
I think "practical purposes" should include the fact that thanks to also shutting down a bunch of nuclear, Sweden regularly imports German/Polish coal power.
Sweden claiming fossile free is only technically true. Practically there's a mountain of greenwashing.
So no, I would not say what you just said. I find that greenwashing dishonest.
By being anti nuclear, the green parties around the world have caused more radiation[1] and climate changing co2 than any other movement in history.
[1] An oft cited statistic is that coal causes more deaths every single year from radiation (excluding accidents) than nuclear has has caused in its entire history INCLUDING accidents.
In 2025, the net export was about 33 TWh. Gross import from Germany, Poland and Lithuania, including transit to other countries, was 1 TWh. So, imported power from countries with coal power plants was less than 1% of total consumption, and the amount of fossil free power exported was more than 30 times greater than the amount of (potentially) fossil power imported. 1-2% fossil energy in the mix is to me not really significant, and especially not considering how much fossil free power is exported.
Sources:
Statistics Sweden table of power import and export: https://www.scb.se/hitta-statistik/statistik-efter-amne/ener...
Basic information about Swedish power generation: https://www.energiforetagen.se/energifakta/elsystemet/produk...
So I think it's untrue to say that Sweden doesn't rely on coal power. Without coal power it'd have regular blackouts. I rely on being able to take a breath every couple of seconds. If I only get an annual average of a breath every few seconds, I'll die.
One could show great generation and net export statistics with a sufficiently large batteryless solar installation, and still import coal power every night and cloudy day.
What is true, but can easily imply an incorrect conclusion, is that Sweden's very good in being self sufficient in clean power generation statistically. Yes, very much true. But it's largely due to geography, and not merely something to replicate. Sweden has way more viable places where hydro could be installed, than most countries (though where economical and otherwise acceptable, it already has). And it's sparsely populated; Sweden is bigger than the UK, but with one seventh the population. So if the implication is that "if we can do it, so can you" then that's false.
Luckily the political wind (including population opinion) has started to turn in favor of nuclear power, again. Maybe everything can be solar in 100 years, but we can't have 100 more years of coal.
The european grid is interconnected so it's basically all fungible. But it's not the case that there would be blackouts, since the price mechanism is used to match production, demand and return on production investments. So policy decisions to ramp down fossil generation result in investment decisions to new non fossil generation capacity.
This is the point I'm making. It's not a counter point, it's exactly the point I'm making. Sweden "has" a bunch of coal plants, just located in Germany and Poland. This allows Sweden to skip planning for exactly what renewable is bad at.
Otherwise this is like saying "antibiotics are completely unnecessary because 99.99% of the time you don't need them, and when I do need them I just get them from a pharmacy". Right… so you do need and rely on them.
But Sweden also has a geographic electricity transportation problem. Electricity generation exists where (most) consumers are not. And this is also due to the MUCH more limited flexibility of renewables, especially hydro. Could easily be cheaper to get coal power in the south instead of hydro "shipped" from way up north. Hell, sometimes electricity in the north has a negative price.
Sweden is a good local example of why we also can't just power all of Europe from some solar panels in Sahara. Except instead it's hydro way up north.
> 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
It seems they consider only coal use in the 21st century in mainland Europe + UK (i.e. not Greenland, Iceland, Svalbard, etc.).
Reference? This seems to be false. Coal is still on decline, while solar is what's ramping up [1][2]
[1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67005
[2] https://ieefa.org/resources/energy-information-administratio...
1. https://www.energy.gov/articles/energy-department-announces-...
Is there something I'm missing here?
The article you linked is mostly about a model of 2026 and 2027 and sure, in the model coal goes away but that's not a fact about coal it's just a model.
"Ramping up" means planned to increase.
Feel free to provide a reference that supports that it's "ramping up". I, and parent, couldn't find one. This is a super boring factual thing that I was curious about, where opinion has no place or purpose.
No it doesn't. It means increasing.
> The US is in an excellent position to massively harness wind and solar and yet right now it's dialing up the coal usage
they are not "dialing it up", they instead have planned reduction.
As I pointed out (please re-read my comment), it was increasing as of the most recent time for which we have data (not projections) available.
Okay, but you're celebrating make-believe virtues. Iceland is also not destroying its tropical coral reefs. That sounds nice...but it has none. Nor any sort of tradition or incentive to try doing that.
The US coal thing is all about widespread memories (and myths) of sustained good economic times, in large areas of the country which now feel destitute. Millions of voters feeling that they have no future. If not that the elites want them to hurry up and die.
To paraphrase Munger - if you want different outcomes there, then you need to change the incentives.
Well, sure is good the environmentalists shut down the German nuclear plants!
It would be good if we could modernize our grid to support easier exchange of power from north to south and vise versa.
Does Russia benefit and probably fund it? Sure.
But DACH environmentalism grew from antinuclear protests, not the other way around, and thus will boycott nuclear even when it goes against their modern stated goals.
Shutting down the nukes is inversely proportional to homeopathy popularity in Germany. That says it all
> Never used coal power: Albania, Cyprus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Switzerland, Norway
But It bought a lot and most of it had come from coal generation.
But yeah, I mean, good job and all. The answer for the rest of the continent is going to be wind and solar in the medium term, and probably more nuclear in the long term.
Anyway, my comment was in response to the extreme comment (parent) about how all rich countries became rich using fossil fuels - implying that that's the more or less only way to transition from poor to rich. I think it's important to note that that's not necessarily the case. You don't need to destroy the environment to go from poor to rich, even though a lot of countries historically have done it that way (also noteworthy that they did it without knowing about the consequences for the environment).
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.
In 2026, coal now provides 0% of the mix while wind provides 30% or more. Peat burning has also been fully phased out while oil (Tarbert) is in the process of being shut down while Moneypoint has been converted to oil but only participates in the capacity market - i.e. as an emergency/backup source - and so barely registers in the mix.
And even if coal was supplanted one-for-one with NG, it would still be a net win - by halving the CO2 intensity of generation as well as being far more flexible, scalable and much cheaper to deploy.
There is absolutely no good reason to burn coal for electricity or heat in this day and age. If we had sane global leadership, every coal power plant left would be treated as a WMD and be bombed harder than that Iranian fuel depot.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...
They have more coal power plants planned and your data hickup worked out during recensions and covid.
- 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.
This means that global consumption will decline too which coincides with both factories and power plants shutting down
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...
Source? Does that take into account full life cycle (including manufacturing)?
This even compares cars built in an unrealistic 100% coal grid, and fuelled on 100% coal grid. Driving 14k miles a year for 10 years a Tesla Model 3 built under those extreme conditions beats a gas Fiat 500
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 of China has been decreasing since 2022.
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=population+of+china+is+decr...
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.
And if your minimum unit size is 1GW then you lose the flexibility to roll out the tech incrementally - the average modern coal plant requires 3 to 5 weeks per year for scheduled downtime for maintenance - so your first 1GW coal plant requires a bunch of other generation sources to cover demand during these periods.
Solar and batteries are the obvious solution for rural electrification: scaleable, cheaper/simpler to deploy - no large scale civil engineering involved, trivial to "operate", effective without the support of big transmission systems and it's possible to buy everything off-the-shelf.
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.
Last I checked mining and transporting coal required quite a lot of heavy industry equipment to do even vaguely economically.
If coal was cheaper and easier than other sources of energy, then the US would be building more coal power plants. But even with the Trump administration placing its weighty thumb on the scale to try and “save coal”. Coal plants are still being shutdown due to simple economics.
If existing plants can compete with renewables, to hard to understand how adding the cost of building new plants is going to change that.
The article also notes that solar and wind capacity grew significantly faster than actual generation, suggesting "unreported curtailment" (where clean energy is wasted because the grid can’t handle it). If curtailment is rising, it means the "clean energy boom" is hitting a hard infrastructure ceiling. The research assumes that if grid issues are resolved, emissions will fall further. However, if the grid cannot integrate this power fast enough, the 290GW of coal power currently under construction will be called upon to fill the gap, potentially leading to a sharp emissions rebound in 2026–2027.
Further, a major driver of the emissions drop is the 7% decline in cement and 3% decline in steel emissions, linked to the ongoing real estate slump. This is a cyclical economic event, not necessarily a green technological victory. If the Chinese government pivots to a new stimulus package (e.g. massive "New Infrastructure" or high-tech manufacturing zones) to save GDP growth, the demand for steel and cement could surge again. The research treats the real estate decline as a permanent plateau, but China’s history of state-led investment suggests that industrial emissions can be turned back on by policy shifts.
Further, the analysis focuses almost exclusively on CO2. China is the world's largest emitter of methane, primarily from coal mine leakages. Even if CO2 emissions from burning coal are flat, continued coal production to feed the coal-to-chemical industry (which grew 12% in this report) results in significant methane venting. If you account for the Global Warming Potential (GWP) of methane, the total greenhouse gas trend might look much less optimistic than the CO2-only trend.
Further, the report credits a 3% increase in hydropower for helping suppress coal. Hydropower in China is extremely volatile and dictated by weather patterns (e.g. the 2022–2023 droughts). A single dry year in the Sichuan or Yunnan provinces can force a massive, immediate pivot back to coal-fired power to prevent blackouts. The 21-month trend may be as much a result of favorable rainfall as it is of solar panels, making it fragile and reversible.
Further, the report highlights a 12% growth in emissions from the chemical industry, driven by coal-to-liquids and coal-to-gas projects. This suggests that China is not decarbonizing its economy so much as re-carbonizing its industrial feedstocks. As China seeks energy security to reduce its reliance on imported oil and gas, it is building a massive coal-based chemical infrastructure. These emissions are harder to abate than power sector emissions and could eventually offset the gains made by wind and solar.
Ultimately, China is still the largest polluter (in every sense of the word) by a large margin. It's nice to see them taking steps to curb this, but we should all remember that any environmental benefits are purely coincidental to their goals of energy independence. We should expect them to rely on a diverse mix of sources - including the 8+ "mega" coal power plants coming online every month.
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.
I understand China has about twice the inhabitant of USA+EU but the same consumption based CO2, am I wrong?
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?
Aircraft:
Airbus seems to be leagues ahead of Boeing, not just in the civilian market, but also in military aircraft. Just look at their competing modern military tankers: the Boieng KC-46 is a worse plane than the Airbus A330 MRTT, but had huge cost overruns and delays.
EU is also at the cutting edge in helicopters, in fact 3 of the 5 new classes of manned helicopters introduced by the US military in the 21st century are from the EU: the MH-139, UH-72 and TH-73.
Submarines:
The Swedish Gotland and Blekinge class, and the German type 212 are both ahead of anything the US has. Wrt. bigger submarines, I don't think there's enough public information to argue that the French Triomphant-class is worse than the US Ohio-class
Advanced missiles:
The IRIS family, MBDA MICA and MBDA Meteor are cutting edge, European air-to-air missiles. MBDA also has a set of modern long, medium and short range anti-shipping missiles: the Otomat, Exocet and Marte. And that's on top of the evolutions of the Saab RBS 15 and Kongsberg/Diehl/Nammo 3SM. And the Swedish Saab NLAW anti-tank missile has been very successful with Ukraine in the past four years.
Cutting edge medical equipment:
Medical equipment is a huge field and very diverse and specialized, so it's easy to miss the areas where the EU is cutting edge. Just some examples I know of:
Siemens and Phillips are still top dogs in MRI machines. Three of the top five hearing aid companies are Danish: Demant, GN Store Nord and WS Audiology[0]. German Karl Storz is _the_ world leader in urology equipment. Danish Ambu is _the_ leader in single use endoscopes. Finnish Planmeca is a leader in dental equipment and their subsidiary Planmed one of the top 3 mammography companies in the world. Danish 3Shape and German exocad are more-or-less the only choices in dental implant CAD/CAM. Just to give a few examples
High voltage grid equipment:
Europe has been constructing a lot wind farms, many of them off-shore, and a decent amount of high-voltage, international electricity connections in recent decades. Most of that has been with European-made equipment. Some of the companies manufacturing that in Europe: Danish NKT, German Siemens and Swiss/Swedish Hitachi Energy (formerly ABB Power Grids) are three I know on top of my head. And then there are companies like Alstom that makes all the infrastructure around electric rail.
Ships:
European navies use warships built in Europe and I've seen nothing to suggest they are worse ships than Chinese warships. So the technology and shipyards are there to produce cutting-edge merchant ships, it's just not cost-effective.
Electric motors:
I've seen nothing to suggest Chinese motors have surpassed anything Swiss/Swedish ABB or Simens motors can do. And there are a ton of smaller, specialized motor manufacturers, e.g. Danish Grundfos that makes specialized motors for pumps.
Steel, aluminum:
The EU is self-sufficient in steel. A quick list of major companies producing steel in Europe: Spanish Acerinox, Luxembourgish ArcelorMittal, Austrian Voestalpine, German ThyssenKrupp, Italian Riva Group, Finnish Outokumpo, German Salzgitter, Swedish SSAB and French Vallourec.
Wrt. aluminum, the EU isn't quite self-sufficient. But ~75% of the imports are from Norway, Turkey, Iceland and Switzerland. So it depends on your definition of Europe.
Oil:
Oil is a commodity. You don't really gain anything technologically from producing it yourself, on the contrary it's seen as almost a curse, re:Dutch disease and so.
Cutting edge pharma:
If there's any category of company that's permanent fixture of EU stock indexes, it's pharma. To give just one example, Biontech, developer one of the two main Covid vaccines, is German.
Wind turbines:
In wind turbines Danish Vestas is number one and Spanish/German Siemens Gamesa is number two. The Chinese are catching up fast, but they're still behind.
Trains:
Spanish Talgo, French Alstom and German Siemens are all world-class EU train companies. Stadler is world-class, but Swiss, so it could also count. Then there's Hitachi Rail Italy (formerly AnsaldoBreda). As a Dane, I'm unwilling to call anything related to AnsaldoBreda "world-class", but the driverless trains they have supplied to the Copenhagen Metro meet the mark.
So I'd argue that there's at least 10 more categories where the EU is at least tied.
0: the last two are Swiss Sonova and American Starkey.
I think that determining a leader is usually far more clear cut. The EU and its bureaucratic-media apparatus love to find abstractions and subjective ways to discuss and measure things, but in reality you can measure production in objective terms. The EU is about 3-5% of global shipbuilding tonnage vs. China's 50-70%. Similarly, China produces 54% of the world's steel and 59% of the world's aluminum; the EU produces 7 and 4% respectively. China has 72% of the wind capacity installed and 4 of the 5 top turbine manufacturers. They similarly dominate numbers for trains (track laid, total HSR track, rolling stock built) and electric motors (market share of drone motors, motor components, EV traction motors, for industrial electric motors the EU and US are at about a quarter of the world market vs. China at 35-40%.)
There are a few areas where things are more subjective. Medical equipment, pharma and high-voltage, I could see a case for current EU ties and I appreciate your perspective.
Aircraft is certainly for the US, though. The EU really only has Airbus and Leonardo. Nobody would disagree that the US wins by far for: fighters, stealth, UAVs, transport, business jets, experimental, VTOL, long range bombers, and yes, helicopters. You cannot compare the US (over 2,000 Black Hawks in the Army alone) to the EU (100 Black Hawks) - the EU has a lot of lightly armed utility helicopters, the US has a massive array of everything from stealth, attack, logistical etc. Yes, sure, Leonardo can design a cool light utility copter, but that is infinitely easier and far less significant than an attack or stealth helicopter. The EU's attempts at serious helicopters (NH90, Airbus Tiger) are mostly a joke. Unless you want to count the AW129? War breaks out, how many of those can Italy send? ...4?
The picture with submarines is similar. The US has an expeditionary nuclear submarine force that can operate around the globe. The EU can do minor regional things, poorly. The Gotlands are cool, but they are small and the Swedes made three (3) of them - thirty years ago.
>Oil is a commodity. You don't really gain anything technologically from producing it yourself
The benefits in peacetime may be limited to dollars, sure; in wartime it is life or death. I am no huge fan of oil but in 2026 it still makes up most of our energy and most of the things around us. I also don't see anyone seriously accusing the US economy of Dutch disease.
>As a Dane, I'm unwilling to call anything related to AnsaldoBreda "world-class"
Hah, +1 for the chuckle :) I am Dutch... ask us what we think of AnsaldoBreda!
[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
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?
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.
So The "worst case scenario" for nuclear power is creating a new wildlife park free from human interference [and emptying out half of Los Angeles]
Apso not sure if you are including coal mining, and all of the deaths and negative health outcomes as a result of the industry
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.
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.
The exclusion zone is nonsense because many that live in that zone has lower cancer rates then those outside. The idea is based on a invalid assumption about radiation an a linear relationship between radiation and harm. An I do think the standards we apply are to extreme in many cases mostly dating back to this misunderstanding about radiation.
As for the locality to nuclear plants and cancer, this is as far as I know been shown in many countries and as far as I know at least can mostly be explained by nuclear plants usually being built in industrial areas that often used to have coal plants and other industry going on.
> nuclear reactors are there for the spicy atoms, not the price tag or public safety.
Not sure what 'spicy' means in this context. In terms of price tag they are objectively a fantastic deal if built in larger numbers. Even in places where they were not built in the numbers they did in France, they are good life time deal, and give relativity stable long term prices.
And they don't have to be 'there' for public safety, they just need a good record on public safety and they do.
In places like Austria and Germany we have many known cases where a nuclear plant was planned and was prevented by activists, only to be replaced by coal, in both cases impacting 10000s of lives being worse financially in the long term.
My parents who lived in central Europe during Chernobyl hate nuclear power, while believing lots of nonsense that was in the news back then.
I have no idea if that's true, but it sounds very plausible.
However, if it was true, it would make it very much easier for governments to justify big spends on pro-nuclear propaganda. I mean, the USA managed to make test-detonations into a tourism opportunity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Las_Vegas#Atomic_te...
Yes indeed. But that wasn't why they were built*, and that safety comes with an enormous cost. Ironically not including the exclusion zone, even with that included the amortised cost is quite small, but rather all the things that Chernobyl didn't have but should've plus all the international inspections and regulations to make sure nobody's secretly got a weapons program, either deliberately or via organised crime.
* Even just plain simple diversity of energy supply is good, as per another comment I made on this topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47309196
> The exclusion zone is nonsense because many that live in that zone has lower cancer rates then those outside. The idea is based on a invalid assumption about radiation an a linear relationship between radiation and harm.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samosely
That's a tiny sample size, consisting of people who are in poverty (and already mostly elderly) and can therefore be expected to have unusual health outcomes. Which could be higher or lower cancer rates, depending on what else is going on. Like, cancer won't get you if you pickle your liver too hard first with moonshine.
Though yes, the linear relationship between radiation and harm is known to be an oversimplification.
> Not sure what 'spicy' means in this context.
Radioisotopes. They're really useful for a lot of stuff, but the options for making them are mostly "fission plant" or "particle accelerator". This includes but is not limited to weapons.
> In terms of price tag they are objectively a fantastic deal if built in larger numbers. Even in places where they were not built in the numbers they did in France, they are good life time deal, and give relativity stable long term prices.
The cheapest are cheap, but the average and the trend line says they're mostly now a worse option than PV+batteries. Your milage, as the saying goes, may vary, so I wouldn't be even mildly surprised if e.g. Alaska says "hydro and nuclear" given this graph: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Alaska_electricity_genera...
> In places like Austria and Germany we have many known cases where a nuclear plant was planned and was prevented by activists, only to be replaced by coal, in both cases impacting 10000s of lives being worse financially in the long term.
Indeed. It was terrible for the environment and general population health that we didn't have a huge roll-out of nuclear power up until the 2010s when renewables got interesting.
But unfortunately, although even the full cost (both monetary and to lives lost) of Chernobyl would, if amortised over all reactors, be much smaller than for fossil plants, the scale of that accident would have been an existential threat to many smaller nations. Arguably, it was existential damage to the USSR, even. People don't want to be subjected to someone else's game of Russian Roulette, not even when the overall odds of survival go up.
For that matter, it has killed many, many more than the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan!
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 ]
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.
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.
No economy on the planet needs 24/7 peak power production. The times humans work correspond nicely with the times the sun is out.
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?
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.
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
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...
Even within Chernobyl Disaster, it was a series of mistakes which led to the full scale disaster IIRC so it isn't as if a single mistake
Also Thorium based Nuclear Reactors wouldn't have this issue from what I understand as in the idea of explosions or anything,
> Nuclear plants are great if they actually happen to get built
I get this part but shouldn't this mean that people should be more vocal about support for Nuclear. We are vocal about support for Solar, might as well be vocal about support for Nuclear and Solar both too?
And off course societal (and geopolitical) acceptance issues.
Right. One thing I've rarely heard emphasized is that, while nuclear power is not at all the same as nuclear weapons, it's still infrastructure that can be repurposed from one to the other. A world where nuclear is the predominant base load power source is a world where nuclear weapons are more accessible due to the proliferation of sibling technologies.
I don’t understand what you mean by “no learning curve”. Do you mean that the learning curve is particularly steep for plant operators?
We make too few nuclear power plants for them to have a noticeable learning curve, and recently each subsequent one ends up more expensive than the latest, notably because of safety regulation. Korea and I think China had the best success in that regard (and France in the 80s) by being able to make real series, but you don't really see those now except maybe China.
More here: https://ourworldindata.org/learning-curve
And people are (mostly irrationally) terrified of it, which matters in democracies.
When multiple systems are combined the percentage of things filtered out is:
Pollutant Typical removal Dust / particulate matter 99–99.9%+ Sulfur dioxide (SO₂) 90–98% Nitrogen oxides (NOx) 70–90% Mercury 80–95%
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.
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.
But: EU is the only effective player in the world that drives energy policy outside its borders, by being a massive market with regulatory power regarding its imports.
If you look at three figures: energy use per capita, emissions per capita, and GDP per unit of energy/emissions, and include imported consumption, the EU's are all trending in a positive direction for many years now.
So stating the EU has de-industralized and its progress on shutting down coal is therefore 'fake' and misleading because it imports its industrial consumption from other countries to which it has simply offloaded its emissions, isn't true.
If major advanced economies are able to move their entire grid away from coal, it means the entire grid globally can move from coal.
"Ah", the critics say, "but manufacturing is so much more complex!"
Really? These are not countries without manufacturing. They have data centres stacked with the latest generation of Nvidia chips, electric rail, major capital cities, populations of millions...
... and of course, China agrees and is trying to move towards decarbonisation of their grid.
Yes, it'll take time, but it'll take even longer if you never start.
I mean, the UK proudly trumpets that they're coal-free, while entertaining a new coking coal mine.
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%
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
Even if some of that replacement is with gas it still helps. Gas emits about half the carbon per kWh.
This is generally overstated. Emissions imported or exported via trade are significantly smaller than domestic emissions for almost every country. In the EU vs China case, accounting for imported/exported emissions basically changes which of the two is doing better, but emission levels are pretty close to begin with (US is already doing significantly worse than China either way).
For China, we are talking about ~1 ton/person/year from trade (in favor of China), while local emissions are at ~8 tons/person/year [1].
You make a valid point, but looking at the actual numbers it turns out that this makes (surprisingly) little difference.
[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/imported-or-exported-co-e...
The whole conversation about clean energy is polluted by the complete misunderstanding of the general population of how energy demands are balanced. Saying you're replacing coal and gas with wind is just nonsense. It's one solution to a bigger problem. The big problem is how to balance your grid across peaks and troughs and that requires a diverse set of clean energy solutions, with wind being one small part of it.
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.
Me too! That was a lot of work, and surprisingly hard to stack.
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!
In a perfect world we would want to reduce emissions as much as possible in every facet of life, but in the real world I think we should pick battles that have the biggest impact.
I've only so many shits to give, and people heating their homes doesn't rank.
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.
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/selling-coal-for-domestic-use-in...
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.
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.
The tech exists - it's mostly just a matter of political will. The economics already justify it. People are making considerable money by starting up BESSs (Battery Energy Storage Systems) and doing time arbitrage on energy.
cf. Iberia, who recently learned that effective storage and intertial pick-up is integral to a stable and efficient power network, and are now spending heavily on both.
It's a pipedream. Yes it's cheap and efficient, but it requires the geography and the will to destroy a local ecosystem.
BESS is what will ultimately win. It's pretty energy dense and it can be deployed on pretty much any junk land location. The only fight you'll have is with the neighbors who don't like it.
My power company, Idaho power, is deploying a 200MWh BESS on a slice of land they've owned for decades near one of their substations. The hardest part has been the permitting (which is now done).
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)
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.
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?
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.
And all of this is confused by the way the nuclear industry uses the term "load following". You'd think it means "changing the power output from moment to moment to match electricity demand" but for nuclear plants it means "changing from one pre-planned constant level to another pre-planned constant level, up to four times per day".[0] There are only three[1] sources of electricity that can be ramped freely enough to exactly match demand: hydro, simple-cycle gas turbines and batteries. All electrical supplies will need some of those three mixed in. Which is why France is still 10% hydro and 10% natural gas in their electricity supply.
0: Some of the most modern Russian plants can move to +-20% of their current target at 10% per minute, but "the number of such very fast power variations is limited, and they are mainly reserved for emergency situations." per your source.
1: OK, there are some obsolete ways too, like diesel generators. At least obsolete at the scale of the electricity grid.
5% 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.
---
Let me quote page 10 of your source "In brief, most of the modern light water nuclear reactors are capable (by design) to operate in a load following mode, i.e. to change their power level once or twice per day in the range of 100% to 50% (or even lower) of the rated power, with a ramp rate of up to 5% (or even more) of rated power per minute". Your own source defines "load following" as changing the targeted power level once or twice per day.
Again on page 14 (about how the French currently run their nuclear plants): "The nuclear power plants operating in the load following mode follow a variable load programme with one or two power changes per period of 24 h". Weirdly enough this is contradicted by table 2.1 on page 20 where they do four changes per day.
---
> Oh look. What's limited is an actual emergency ramp up of 5% per second or power drops of 20% per minute.
If you look at table 2.4 on the same page it states that it (the Russian VVER-1200) can do the 5% per second/20% per minute emergency change 20 000 times over the lifetime of the reactor. The 10% per minute change can also only be done 20 000 times over the lifetime of the reactor. Table 2.2 on page 21 helpfully calculates that 15 000 cycles is once per day for 40 years, so the VVER-1200 only can do a bit more than one >5% change per day (outside of emergencies) assuming a similar 40 year lifespan. And that was the point of my footnote: that nuclear plants technically can go faster than 5% but not up and down on a minute-by-minute basis.
If you keep jumping around with your arguments, nothing is extreme.
Your original claim started with claiming cold starts (which most power plants including gas turbines don't do, ever) and that coal and nuclear aren't fast.
Nuclear is plenty fast.
I never claimed gas power stations were slow, or that they were slower than nuclear.
> If you look at table 2.4 on the same page it states that it (the Russian VVER-1200) can do the 5% per second/20% per minute emergency change
Let me slowly walk you through that statement:
--- start quote ---
can do the 5% per second/20% per minute emergency change
emergency change
emergency
--- end quote ---
> And that was the point of my footnote: that nuclear plants technically can go faster than 5% but not up and down on a minute-by-minute basis.
No idea what your footnote was about, and how it is relevant.
> 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.
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.
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.
Your argument only works in entirely state controlled systems, not in free energy markets of independent suppliers. Which is why nukes don’t get built.
Nukes don't get built because:
- billions (if not trillions) of subsidies were poured into wind and solar over decades to make them viable while nuclear energy was addled with additional taxes, reactor closures, and very few new reactor licenses
- decades of fear-mongering led to loss of expertise in building new nuclear power plants (and instead South-East Asia has been picking up speed in building new reactors) [1]
In 2015 nuclear was significantly cheaper than most other types of energy across most markets: https://world-nuclear.org/images/articles/REPORT_Economics_R... (Figure 12, in some markets including the then-emerging renewables). And yet renewables were enjoying unprecedented amounts of subsidies and money poured into them while nuclear... Oh we know what was happening to nuclear, just look at Germany.
[1] Here's EU's own report: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=COM:2025...
Renewables: 80-80 billion euro in subsidies a year.
Fossil fuels: 60-140 billion euro in subsidies a year.
Nuclear: good luck finding the thin orange line in the graph. (1% of subsidies)
--- start quote ---
As shown on Figure 4 , solar energy received by far the largest share of subsidies, both historically and in 2023 (EUR 21 bn), followed by biomass (EUR 9 bn) and wind power (EUR 7 bn). Hydropower received marginal financial support (~EUR 1 bn), while subsidies targeting multiple renewable technologies (such as tax reductions on green technology or public aid for investment projects) jumped to EUR 23 bn by 2023.
Subsidies for nuclear energy dropped from EUR 7.9 bn in 2021 to 3.7 bn in 2022 and 4.1 bn in 2023. Of the 14 MS providing nuclear subsidies, France (EUR 2.9 bn) accounted for the biggest share, followed by Germany (EUR 0.8 bn) , Spain and Belgium (EUR 0.1 bn each).
--- end quote ---
It was fraud from the top down and the manufacturer went bankrupt. I paid more for power in SC than I ever did when I lived in “summer all year” Florida. But I guess I got a token check in the mail some years later.
Plant got completely abandoned and I got to help subsidize this failure.
China: "Nearly every Chinese nuclear project that has entered service since 2010 has achieved construction in 7 years or less." [1] Building over 40 reactors since 2005
[1] https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/chinas-impressive-...
Even china, a nuclear construction scale/cost/time success story, can’t make them compete with renewables.
What matters is “share of the grid when solar literally cannot provide the power at any price”.
In a well designed and functional grid share of nuclear power should be close to 100% of the latter and the lowest percentage of the former you can get away with.
It’s better to think of nuclear as energy storage with a really really long lasting battery that costs the same to run it 24/7 or 1 hour a month.
Ideally it would be replacing close to all baseload/reliable power on the grid outside of hydro - with hydro being your peakers instead of natural gas for topologies amenable to it. The power share graph should look like nuclear at close to 100% at night less wind and battery storage that backs wind unreliability - and that graph remaining flat throughout the peak daytime hours with other energy sources kicking in such as solar, hydro, duck curve sized battery arrays, etc.
Solar is so cheap it will push nukes off the grid during the day, you don’t get credit just because it’s more reliable. People will just build more and more solar till the nukes share in the day is zero. And at night people are incentivized to build more wind and batteries, because you can still undercut the expensive nuke power and push it off. When the wind doesn’t blow at night there’s gas and hydro peakers. And more and more batteries. There’s increasingly no room left for nukes that have to be sold at 100% for 100% of the time to still be the most expensive form of energy.
The only way nukes have a role at scale today is if you have state intervention in the market to force the grid to buy your nuke power at close to 100% at the baseline share you described, because you have a nation-state goal of reliability that you prioritize higher than cost. Essentially subsidizing the nukes. And I’m sympathetic to that goal, but that’s not mostly not what western markets do, and not what they will do. Making power deliberately more expensive is unpopular, and not neoliberal marketism
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...
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.
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...
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.
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 neither cheap nor abundant in Ireland.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...
Also you mention albino and I can't find what that would mean in this context. At first I assumed you meant albedo but that doesn't seem to contextually match either. So I might just be misunderstanding your post.
You've not cited anything for this so far as I can see, but this claim is obviously false.
Reason being, the entire system in my driveway will have paid for itself in one year, including delivery cost and inverter and the aluminium stand it's mounted on (the small bit of aluminium in the stand is the most energy intensive part of the whole kit), and the weakest part of that system still has a lifespan of 25-40 years, and even that as a % reduction in output from peak not as a hard cut-off.
Even if 100% of the cost was energy, even with the 5x price differential between where I am (Domestic Germany) and where they were made (Industrial China, where the low energy cost is… ah… due to renewables, because coal's really expensive :P), it's obviously not an ERoEI of 4 even on the low end of that lifespan.
Given all that and doing the maths, what I will need to replace and when (or rather, kids whose mother I have yet to meet will need to replace when I'm in a retirement home), the ERoEI is at a minimum 14 even if 100% of the cost of replacement panels is energy.
The cost is almost certainly less than 100% energy. Every step of the industrial process wants its own profit margin.
For one the EROEI isn't 4 for renewables under ideal conditions, it differs wildly depending on the type and location and installation. It's true that for solar in Ireland (which are NOT ideal conditions) its on the low end, though still about twice as much as 4, and it's certainly not the case for wind which can have them as high as 20.
Second, I've got no clue what 'albino' is. Do you mean albedo? In that case, it's completely irrelevant for wind power. Ireland produces 20x more wind than solar, the latter is completely irrelevant in Ireland.
For solar albedo is relevant, but only if you have bifacial panels, which are still the minority.
In Spain albedo is relatively low but it has some of the highest direct sunshine hours in Europe. Albedo is high in places like the Nordics, which have fewer sunshine hours. In other words, EV is brilliant in Spain due to the abundant sun, yet surprisingly is still viable in a place like Norway precisely because of relatively high albedo, not in spite of it. This is why EROEI for solar in Spain can get up to 20. The idea that you get as much power as it took to make (EROEI of 1) is so wrong, and so obviously wrong, that it seems like you just don't have any idea what you're talking about.
https://www.eirgrid.ie/news/new-record-wind-energy-all-islan...
For actual generation over a longer time period, 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...
I do see in the political goals for Ireland that they, like Germany and many other countries in EU, are relying on the idea to turn wind into green hydrogen once they hit that 100% during optimal weather. Peoples faith in that strategy has gone down significant in the last 5-10 years.
I guess we need a new planet when we're done filling it with junk and have depleted all the rain forest etc
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.
> The EROEI of renewables is 4
Saying "renewables" have an EROEI of 4 is disingenuous at best. "Renewables" isn't one technology, it covers everything from wind to solar to geothermal to hydro. That 4 figure comes from worst-case transitional modelling of buffered wind specifically, and even then it's a temporary system-wide dip, not a measurement of what these technologies actually deliver[1]. Wind and solar individually come in at >=10:1 and rising as the tech matures[2]. Geothermal actually is in the hundreds, but that obviously isn't globally applicable. Lumping all of that together and slapping a "4" on it is either ignorant or deliberately misleading.
And the "hundreds" figure for fossil fuels is pure fantasy. Conventional oil sits at roughly 18-43:1, and US fossil fuel discovery EROI has cratered from ~1000:1 in 1919 to about 5:1 in the 2010s[3]. A paper in Nature Energy last year took it further and showed that when you measure EROI at the useful energy stage - accounting for all the waste heat from combustion - fossil fuels drop to about 3.5:1, while wind and solar beat the equivalent threshold even with intermittency factored in[4]. So "the laws of physics" are actually making a pretty strong case for renewables here.
> If you want solar PV to help with AGW, they must be sited somewhere with an solar albino > .25
I think you mean albedo. And that claim has been tested[5], a satellite study of 352 solar sites found the actual albedo reduction was much smaller than what's typically assumed, and the warming effect was offset by avoided emissions within roughly a year at most sites. A separate study of 116 solar farms found a net cooling effect on land surface temperature[6]. The idea that solar north of Barcelona is "making AGW worse" just doesn't survive contact with the data.
> ...but they don't care about your politics (or mine)
What a deeply unserious tone to take in a discussion like this. Where in my comment did I mention politics of any kind? Is any mention of renewables in a positive light political to you, or is it where I questioned whether the same scrutiny gets applied to fossil fuels? Because that's not politics, that is just reality which you seem to care so much about.
Newsflash, you don't need to be a leftist (which is what I assume you're insinuating) to realize that relying solely on a very finite, heavily polluting fuel source that has already caused disastrous effects to the Earth is maybe not the smartest long-term play. That's not politics, that's just common sense and basic risk management. Not to mention the decades of propaganda, lies, bribery and other bullshittery that big oil has wrought upon us. You'd think people who call themselves true conservatives and free-market capitalists would be the first ones evangelizing against all of that, but apparently not.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09218...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09218...
[3] https://westernresourceadvocates.org/publications/assessment... and also just the wikipedia page on the ROI of various energy sources
[4] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-024-01518-6
[5] https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01619-w
[6] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0038092X2...
https://www.usitc.gov/publications/332/executive_briefings/e...
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 makes as much sense as a modern fuel as horse drawn buses do for transport.
In 20 years time China gonna be entirely powered by renewables while we’re still having this silly argument about what the future is going to look like.
How'd that work out?
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.
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.
Places like California, which is right up there w/ Tunisia as the best-case scenario for solar, will have so much surplus electricity that USX and Tata are rushing to build steel mills there to take advantage.
Any day now, for sure.
No one ever claimed CA would have “so much surplus electricity that USX and Tata are rushing to build steel mills”.
Your “concern” was that there is no non-fantasy means to deal with transient output of solar or other renewables, I showed you how that is being implemented in the real world as we speak to deal with CA’s notorious peak evening load without blackouts. And it will only become more cost effective over time thanks to economies of scale.
CA has just started bringing grid storage online in the last few years but it’s already making an appreciable difference during peak times that in the past years resulted in blackouts.
It shows the clear, achievable path to a renewable + battery (+ nat gas) future that’s 95% renewables and highly resilient. Grid storage isn’t a “10 years away” fantasy like anti-renewable advocates might wish and it’s the critical piece to make those plans possible.
Again-I have been hearing for 25 years about the infinite potential of solar energy in CA-and yet, even now, you need to play games as to when the cheapest time of day it is to charge your car from your residential address.
There will be when it’s needed in a decade or two. Right now solar farms installed recently have years to go until they’re decommissioned. There’s already processes for it.
They’re almost entirely glass and aluminium anyway. We know how to recycle glass and aluminium.
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.
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.
...except China, who is building coal plants at a pace never seen in history. Are they dumb, or...?
China is building everything at a pace never before seen in history. Partly because their construction industry is a jobs program, and their economy is so dependent on it that they prefer building things at a loss rather than not building at all. Which is financially dumb, but welcome to politics.
By the way, the round trip of: Sell and export your coal to manufacturers that burn that coal to produce electronic goods that produce energy, then buy that energy technology to power your own infrastructure, is certainly not cheaper than just burning the coal you mined yourself for your energy production.
Cheaper (ergo, more profitable) for the mining companies, yes. That's about it though.
Right now China is building out more solar and wind per year than than the entire total deployed solar and wind in the entire UK, and they’re only getting fast. Their ability build renewables now vastly outstrips their historical coal buildout and their rising energy demands. They’re well on their way to achieving net zero far faster than anyone thought was possible.
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...
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.
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.
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).
Are you talking about the marginal cost? Don't blame the govt, blame the economics textbook.
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:
Nuclear defeats coal in all of these aspects, aside from the high upfront cost.
But sure, nuclear is cheap if you ignore all those things.
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.
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.
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.
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.
These are what makes it cost 5x solar or wind.
https://www.ourworldofenergy.com/images/electrical-power-gen...
Nuclear, inclusive of construction costs: ~$181/MWh, only better than natural gas because no CO2. Nuclear, cost of continuing to operate an existing reactor once it's already built: $31/MWh, basically the cheapest thing on the market, half the cost of continuing to operate an existing natural gas plant (because you need so much less fuel).
What this implies is that if you build a nuclear plant you're going to want to continue operating it for 80 years, and even then you probably want to just modernize it again instead of actually decommissioning it.
The long-term average returns from ordinary investments (e.g. S&P 500) are ~10%/year, implying that even if you require decommissioning to be prefunded (unlike any competing form of power generation), the amount of money you need is less than 0.05% of what the cost will be in 80 years. Adding $500 million in decommissioning costs isn't $500M in net present costs, it's only $250 thousand in net present costs, because you take the $250k and add 80 years worth of interest (1.10^80) which multiplies your starting capital by more than a factor of 2000.
It's really just the construction, and that's in significant part because you have to build more of them to get economies of scale for building them.
This is disingenuous. Bad math is focusing on the one part of nuclear power which is relatively cheap (fuel) and ignoring the rest where the majority of the cost is, which is what you did.
I wasnt comparing nuclear power to gas anyway I was comparing it to solar and wind which produce no CO2. FIVE times cheaper LCOE.
Nuclear power needs anyway to be paired with dispatchable energy source like batteries or gas just as solar and wind do.
It isnt a competitor with gas or batteries it is a complement to gas and batteries, just like solar and wind.
The majority of the cost is construction, which is expensive when you're trying to amortize the costs of a plant design over only one or two plants instead of a hundred, which is what I said.
> FIVE times cheaper LCOE.
Five times cheaper as long as you want the most output when the market price is the lowest and the least output when it's the highest. And "five times" is with existing subsidies.
> Nuclear power needs anyway to be paired with dispatchable energy source like batteries or gas just as solar and wind do.
Nuclear power is baseload. All three of those do different things.
Suppose you have 10 GW of minimum load (e.g. late evening to sunrise) and 20 GW of peak load (e.g. late afternoon to early evening). Then nuclear is good for the former and solar+storage is good for the difference between the former and the latter.
To begin with, solar output actually partially aligns with the latter. Load is higher during the day. It's also high just after sunset, but that's only for a couple hours, and then you don't need a lot of batteries to cover it, which you can charge with more solar. But you'd need a lot more batteries (or gas plants) to make it through the whole night. That kind of sucks if load looks like it currently does, and it really sucks if you want people to switch from fossil fuels to electric heat, because then the highest load is going to be in the hours of darkness on the days with the least sunlight.
Meanwhile it's not just a problem that there is no solar output when it's dark. Sometimes renewable output is low for an extended period of time. It could be at 20% of typical for a month. Having enough batteries to last a month rather than just overnight is prohibitively expensive. So instead you'd have to build five times as much generation, which is only the same cost as nuclear because of government subsidies (which would require a much larger government budget allocation if you tried to build that much of them), and only if you're using the recent high price of nuclear that comes from building very few plants instead the lower prices that would be possible by doing it at scale.
And even using the subsidized price for renewables against the current price for nuclear, if you actually tried to build five times the capacity in renewables, the "generates the most when the market price is the lowest" thing would destroy you. The price on most days would then be zero because of huge oversupply and you'd have to recover the same total cost as current nuclear from only the days when your output is lowest.
Meanwhile if you use nuclear for what it is, i.e. baseload, and build only as much of it as you have minimum load throughout the day, it not only doesn't require any storage, it avoids the need for solar to use storage to supply power at night. Then you use solar for the incremental load during the day, to charge the batteries to use for the incremental load in the early evening and for charging electric vehicles by putting chargers in workplaces.
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.
Not even then. Coal is dead, and gas killed it. The externalities are a distraction, coal plants are just straight-up uneconomic.
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.
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.
The claim of "previous underinvestment" ignores the massive capital outlays of the last decade. Ireland has actually seen massive investment in its grid to accommodate renewables, but the efficiency of that spend is questionable. We have a "constraint payment" system where we pay wind farms not to produce power when the grid is congested. In 2023 alone, these payments reached hundreds of millions of euros. This isn't "underinvestment". It's an operational failure to align generation with grid capacity, a cost that is hidden in the consumer's bill.
You suggest that "saving the world harder" (more renewables) would have lowered prices. This ignores the Marginal Pricing Model. In the Single Electricity Market (SEM), the price of electricity is set by the most expensive generator needed to meet demand - which is almost always a gas-fired plant. Therefore, even if wind provides 80% of the power at a given moment, consumers often still pay the "gas price" for all of it. Adding more renewables without reforming the marginal price auction system does nothing to lower the immediate cost to the consumer. It just increases the profit margins for renewable operators.
I should also comment on the source of that report: Nevin Economic Research Institute (NERI). NERI is not a neutral academic body. It is the research arm of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU). NERI’s research is fundamentally rooted in Social Democratic and Labor-centric economics. Their reports consistently advocate for increased public spending and state intervention. By focusing on "underinvestment" and "network costs," NERI shifts the blame away from the policy failures of the green transition and toward a narrative that justifies more state-led infrastructure spending. They often downplay the impact of aggressive carbon taxing and the "Public Service Obligation" (PSO) levy, which are direct policy choices that have inflated Irish bills compared to the EU average.
Finally, the "poor connections to neighbors" argument is becoming obsolete. With the Greenlink and Celtic Interconnector (to France) coming online, Ireland is becoming one of the most strategically connected islands in Europe. If isolation were the primary driver, prices should be falling as these projects near completion. Instead, they remain the highest in the EU (often 40-50% above the average). The "island" excuse is a convenient shield for domestic policy inefficiencies.
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...
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.
In no other industry are providers ever worried about selling too much.
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.
| NIMBY-ism.
True but it effects are much worse due to poor planning laws
Ireland is richer than it has ever been. Poverty and housing difficulties have nothing to do with reducing emissions.
Ireland partly got rich by being a massive CO2 polluter per capita. Now we are rich it’s only fair we lead in transitioning to renewables. Renewables are cheaper now than most forms of energy production. Grids need investment.
I despair at these short sighted and fairly wrong on the facts views.
Isn't that more about big tech companies using Ireland as a tax dodge, rather than a sign of average people doing well?
For less-well-off people, energy costs in the UK are a huge issue, they're more than twice what they were pre-Covid. Energy bills are second only to housing costs when it comes to the cost of living crisis. Although grocery price inflation/shrinkflation has been pretty shocking too.
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...
In an ideal situation we would be seeing a ramp up in production of all types to take advantage of the costs.
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?
What is your point?
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.
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.
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.
We appreciate your restraint.
If you build more solar it'll meet 100% of demand for a larger portion of the day, which is what we're doing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Talk about ill informed.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/median-in...
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.
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.
> 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!
The huge energy price spikes are down to wars in Ukraine (gas, which is also used for electricity production) and the Middle East.
"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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
From what I understand Ireland has very little natural gas, very little coal and a not particularly large amount of peat. If they didn't shift towards importing all of that would be gone in the very near future.
It's a bit weird how it gets branded as a solely green move when there's clearly other motives for it.
For practical purposes no coal. There are no working coal mines in Ireland, and Moneypoint would have run entirely on imported coal since it was built. It was built with a bulk handling terminal for this purpose (very visible in photos of the plant: https://esb.ie/news---insights/inside-esb/moneypoint-power-s...).
Note that it doesn't have a rail link; even if there had been the desire to use domestic coal and someone had gotten a mine going, there would have been no way to get it there.
https://progressireland.substack.com/p/irish-electricity-is-...
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.
Per ton, yes. In practical, it’s far more complicated. Ships turn “heavy fuel oil” which is one tiny step from crude. It’s literally the byproduct that we have no better use for except for extremely large slow diesel engines.
If the tankers had to burn more useful fuel, we wouldn’t do it. The emissions on this unrefined bulk fuel is extremely bad.
Rail competes for efficiency depending on sea factors, and truck never does. But mining locally is far far more efficient that shipping literally to the other side of the world on ships that are burning 45 tons of fuel per day.
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 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.
Being dependent on gas is equal to being exposed to global shocks, unless you can cover your domestic needs purely with domestic gas extraction.
"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.
Again, our poor decision making around national infrastructure is on our governments. They left have left us completely exposed to international markets.
As usual with the Greens, perfection was the enemy of the good.
This is a weird way to justify using LNG brought in through Britain.
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.
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.
The sheer number of people in this thread saying, "we need renewables to be independent!", from countries that don't actually manufacture anything, is astonishing.
Also all these economies do make stuff, they just don't employ huge numbers of semi-skilled workers to do so. Most of the factory jobs are gone, but the factories are not. I live in a port city, about a century ago this city had loads of jobs crewing ships and loading cargo but today more work is done by a tiny fraction as many people.
Coal or gas on the other hand...anyone can cut off Ireland anytime.
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.
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.
But don't expect me to take you seriously when you directly compare a raw price of renewable energy with an uplifted price of fossil fuels.
Especially when your quoted price for renewable energy ignores the cost of grid upgrades, storage infrastructure, and externalities associated with mining materials to manufactur solar panels and wind turbines etc (as happened recently in UK parliament when the energy minister did a very dubious comparison between energy prices)
Solar panels can be recycled, so eventually they will need very little mining.
Have you ever recycled gasoline? Have you ever heard of the Deepwater Horizon?
I think you're being disingenuous while accusing others.
Source for this claim? figures show 10-15% of power is imported, not "most", and those fluctuate with wind generation.
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.
> 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.
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)
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.
As I browse the comments here I lament that most "above average IQ" folks still don't get this simple truth.
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 ?
https://www.ft.com/content/86fdb9e4-3db4-4e4f-8e47-580a1fad2...
Made some reasonable points imo
From what, turf? Back in the 1980s Ireland was importing coal from Poland because domestic mines weren't efficient. You're full of it.
"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.
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.
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/china-...
BREAKING NEWS: China is big.
Of course, maybe the goal here is worth killing 4.5+++ million people per year. There are no perfect solutions; only compromises. Maybe many more will die if we don't act. [The IPCC estimates that an additional 250,000 people per year, between 2030 and 2050, will die from the effects of climate change.](https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/climate-cha...) That covers all modes of death, such as famine. For those in the room doing the math, many times more people will die today by making energy more expensive. Activists are asking us to sacrifice millions of lives per year today to save an estimated 250,000 lives per year decades from now.
For this reason, I no longer support making energy more expensive. I support environmental efforts to reduce pollution, but I can no longer justify the high cost of human life associated with taxes on energy. Instead, I really think activists should focus on making energy cheaper. This means working on solutions to make renewable energy and nuclear cheaper per unit of energy than fossil fuels. That's a path to saving lives which I think most people can get on board with.
You can see here the electricity figures in Ireland: https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/IE/all/yearly
> We've graduated from providing cheap energy to now importing most of our energy. We've seen huge energy price increases as a result.
Wrong. As you can see Ireland always produced a very limited about of electricity from coal, around 11% ten years ago when wind was 10% less. In other words, wind simply replaced coal, not imports.
For the last 50 years gas provides the bulk of your electricity, but Ireland produces virtually no gas and has always imported it. The jump in prices was due to these gas prices increasing due to the Russia/Ukraine war as of 2020, it had nothing to do with import changes. Had you invested more in wind/solar, you'd be affected less.
In fact Ireland barely imports anything at all, over the last ten years the net import are close to zero. 2025 was a peak year for imports but even then imports constituted a small 13%, whereas 2024 was a year where Ireland was a net exporter, as was 2020, and 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019. In fact of the last ten years it was a net exporter 7 times, more than twice as often as the 3 years it was a net importer. And its imported when the UK has cheaper electricity prices, otherwise there'd be no reason to import.
So your entire argument isn't true. Wind/solar can beat coal on a cost-basis now, evidenced by the fact that the average existing coal plant isn't running half the time because it's more expensive, let alone building out more coal. The smartest thing to have done is mass-invest in solar/wind in a country with a population density 4x lower than the UK.
I mean, at least you shut down the coal plants, those are legit bad for the environment. Germans shut down nuclear which is clean.
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
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
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.
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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_population_projections
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_lunar_outpost_concepts#Ar...
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.
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.
Poland I guess?
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
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.
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...
https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?cha...
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.
Look at the nuclear buildup. Vogtle in US 10 years. Hinckley Point C is estimated to be 13 years. Flamanville 3 took 17 years. All these years you put money in and get nothing out. It's a disaster for balance sheet. Instead, you can build renewables plus batteries and have it connected within a year, generating revenue.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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
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-...
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.
Prof Igor Shvets was behind this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_of_Ireland
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-...
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...
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.
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...
... 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...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_United_Kingd...
Also https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/14/offshore...
Also https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/feb/10/uk-onshore-...
So still claiming that we didn't build any wind power was false.
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://www.seai.ie/data-and-insights/seai-statistics/electr...
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%)
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...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
(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.)
Edit: instead of downvoting my post, feel free to pay my electric bill, lol
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
China connected 4 solar panels per SECOND last year. China is also has 265x the population and has growing energy demands. They build much less coal than they phase out.
All you can muster is a "But uh china is doing something so you are irrelevant" which is neither helpful nor correct. You are supporting the status quo and support not changing a damn thing.
Also its fair to bring them up, they are responsible for 36% of the worlds pollution and hold the lowest environmental standards in the 1st world. Without them working to combat this issue its pointless for anyone else to try.
United States: per capita about 3x the global average CO2
Projections for China is that these numbers will go down massively over the next 10 years. How is that going for the US for "lowest environmental standards in the 1st world"? Please get over your 20 year old views of china. They get their act together while the US shits the bed.
We can talk about 50% new car registrations are EVs in china and how the US is doing?
Or how ~60% of all renewable capacity added globally by 2030 will be in China? Or how it is already at 50%?
if the US doubled its output but added another 500m to its population would you consider that to be a reduction in emissions or a positive trend? No it wouldnt because emissions are still rising. Climate change doesnt care that you have 1.8b people it just looks at the Co2 output.
All thanks to our Epstein-class-alien-AI-zionist-lizard overlords.
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.
Good luck repairing your renewable energy infrastructure if you're hit by one of many different classes of attacks.
Coal and coal-burning energy production is an insurance policy, at the very least.
Countries have been getting rid of their oil refineries as well, and now look what is happening to those countries, given the Iran situation. Their price of fuel is skyrocketing, their reserves are dwindling, and panic is setting in. Hope is not a strategy.
Relying on third party supply chains for key infrastructure that would result in mass casualty if it were to vanish, is not intelligent. It's a vulnerability.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse_gas_emis...
Coal, with any available technology, is more polluting than any renewable energy source. Full life cycle including plant installation included.