Irish man here - Over the last few years, we've graduated from providing cheap energy to now importing most of our energy. We've seen huge energy price increases as a result. We're seeing more and more cost-of-living protests, the war now means more will suffer with fuel prices and we're still going ahead with closing down energy suppliers (this is a 2025 article but the point still stands).
To anyone praising these stupid, politically incentivised initiatives - congratulations to us on making the poor and middle-classes poorer.
But it's all good - we're saving the world I guess. The poor folks can sort themselves out.
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.
A very fair question and the answer is complicated. Production costs and transmission costs are separate. Also demand changes the market rate. And even if renewables are cheaper to produce in a market usually the highest price regardless of source sets the price. This is to incentivise the cheapest production methods to be invested in.
It’s a massive topic and I encourage everyone to go and dive into it. It’s endlessly fascinating and also one of the really positive stories in the world right now which can help balance your emotions in a sometimes depressing world. At least for me it does.
> This is to incentivise the cheapest production methods to be invested in.
It's also just a rule of economics. The price is set at the cost of the most expensive production necessary to meet demand.
So if solar could fulfill 100% of energy demand, price would be the cost of solar, and any other more expensive generation would either lose money, shut down or idle.
But if we shut down or idle those today we wouldn't have enough electricity, so the price rises until the more expensive plants can stay open and demand is met.
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.
You would have to normalize against other costs and do a deep dive to really understand. My first question would be whether electricity (commercial and residential) has become relatively more expensive than gas, beer, and other commodities. If it's the same rate then it's more of an overall inflation thing. If electricity really is far and away higher than the rest over time then one would have to look at laws, the grid, demand, and of course supply too.
> Poverty and housing difficulties have nothing to do with reducing emissions.
This is such a shit, classist take. It shouldn’t surprise me, after all I’m on a forum where people are all too happy to sell their souls to the likes of Alphabet and Meta for those juicy comps, but, even so, to fail to understand how come higher energy prices are fucking up the poors and the low-middle-classes is beyond stupid.
> Ireland partly got rich by being a massive CO2 polluter per capita.
This argument that we have to self destruct to have the moral highground just keeps getting repeated, for maybe two decades now.
We, as in the West, got there first because we are luckier/better organised/evil colonialists/whatever, take your pick it doesn't matter.
China DGAF about our self perceived virtuousness, they know windpower and solar are not viable long term, they're just happy to sell us more panels and propellers like any other widget from a factory with a profit margin. Web search how many Chinese coal plants came online in the last six months.
> they know windpower and solar are not viable long term
That’s why they are installing it all over their country at the fastest pace of any country by far? That’s why they probably hit peak oil consumption?
The coal thing is complicated in China. They are replacing many old coal stations, local governments are fearful of being caught short in a cold winter which has happened. Rate of coal consumption increases is slowing. Peak coal may have happened last year.
>"China is the world's top electricity producer from renewable energy sources. China's renewable energy capacity is growing faster than its fossil fuels and nuclear power capacity.[1] China installed over 373 GW of renewables in 2024, reaching a total installed renewable capacity of 1,878 GW by the end of the year. The country aims to have 80% of its total energy mix come from non-fossil fuel sources by 2060, and achieve a combined 1,200 GW of solar and wind capacity by 2030.[1]
>Although China currently has the world's largest installed capacity of hydro, solar and wind power, its energy needs are so large that some fossil fuel sources are still used."
Seems more renewables came online than non-renewables, perhaps your take is outdated?
And are you sure about your claim? Every time I hear anything about China and Solar the core of it is that solar in China is growing more than anywhere else on the planet ( 40% increase in 2025 and creating ~11% of China's energy already )
And that there is no sign of that trend slowing down anytime soon. And why would it. Solar panels are dirt cheap and they have more than enough space for it.
China is also really strong in the battery space, so they have everything they need to ditch oil/coal eventually
China leads the world in solar energy, by a wide margin. Yes, they have hedged their bets somewhat with coal, but you cannot claim with a straight face that China believes renewable energy is nonviable.
Steelman: in the 2000's and 2010's China did not know if wind power and solar were viable in the long term. They put a lot of money in wind & solar, but also lots of alternatives: nuclear, coal, hydro, geothermal.
By 2020 it was obvious that wind & solar were viable long term, so investments in nuclear et al dried up. But they weren't convinced that batteries were viable long term, so they built a lot of coal peakers for night power.
By 2025 it became obvious that batteries were more viable and cheaper than coal peakers, so they've started to build battery storage at a vast scale.
So steelman is that the OP's viewpoint is ~10 years out of date.
Taiwan and perhaps other Asian countries that successfully make stuff don't expose their industries to this, the government sets a fixed energy price for them rather than leaving them at the whim of speculators.
You are right that Taiwan doesn't. But it has consequences, Taipower is forced to undercharge against market prices, but is backstopped by the government.
At the end of the day, it's a global market, and if you want it 'cheap' someone has to pick up the tab. Either it's taxpayers now, taxpayers in the future or consumers now.
"TAIPEI (TVBS News) — Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰) announced on Tuesday (Nov. 19 2024) plans to subsidize Taiwan Power Company (台灣電力公司) with NT$100 billion to address rising international fuel costs and stabilize prices"
=> over $3bn USD! This is not a small amount of money.
I do often wonder with this kind of thing whether an unspoken aspect of it is about not depleting the country's fossil fuels
From what I understand Ireland has very little natural gas, very little coal and a not particularly large amount of peat. If they didn't shift towards importing all of that would be gone in the very near future.
It's a bit weird how it gets branded as a solely green move when there's clearly other motives for it.
For practical purposes no coal. There are no working coal mines in Ireland, and Moneypoint would have run entirely on imported coal since it was built. It was built with a bulk handling terminal for this purpose (very visible in photos of the plant: https://esb.ie/news---insights/inside-esb/moneypoint-power-s...)
Here in England we now drag the coal over on smoke spewing ships from Japan and Australia, rather than mine it here. The sum total of CO2 is higher than if we just mined it here. Net zero box ticking.
Goal-shifting aside, and be that as it may for offshoring, but Neoliberalism was Thatcher, and she was popular in part because the trade unions were seen as too powerful, which in part was because of the then-recent history of the coal miners' union going on strike and forcing a three-day week for much of British industry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Day_Week
We never had particularly cheap energy. The recent increases in energy cost were largely driven by gas price increases due to the war in Ukraine.
> we've graduated from providing cheap energy to now importing most of our energy.
... Eh? We've always imported most of our energy. Or, well, okay, since about the mid 19th century we've imported most of our energy. All coal used in Moneypoint was imported. We do produce some of our own gas, but it is not and never has been enough. The fraction of energy that we import has actually fallen somewhat due to wind and solar.
Electricity generated from peat peaked at 19.5% in 1990, apparently.
So that's already outstripped by renewables (42% in 2025). So renewables have enabled local production to reach more than double the share that peat ever managed.
(And the comparison is actually even better than it seems at first glance, given that the 2025 figures are all-island and the peat figures would be 3 or 4 points lower if you included NI. A good chunk of the 23.2% imports can probably also be classed as renewable, given that GB had a 47% renewable mix)
Another Irishman here.
Stop trying to harken back to some notional "good old days" that didn't exist. People are better off than they've ever been.
Energy was always expensive relative to income. When I was a kid in the 80s, we weren't allowed to turn on the central heating unless there were arctic conditions. The main issue driving COL issues is the complete lack of social housing construction for the last 15 years. You can't blame the tree huggers for that. Renewable energy is a matter of national security, and prevents our hard earned money being sent overseas to regimes like Russia and all the charmers in the Middle East. Our very first electricity plant as a free state was hydro ffs.
No country will be truly coal-free until they are a net energy exporter and they do not import any goods that use coal-based energy in their supply chain. Europe has de-industrialized which means it has effectively exported its coal burden.
Being coal-free is possible. Being fossil-fuel free is harder. Most of Irish energy comes from Natural Gas and Oil - the former is what supplanted Coal, not Wind.
I agree. Whenever numbers show that China is the largest CO2 polluter currently, it needs to be mentioned that China manufactures much of the world's physical goods.
- Peak coal usage is likely to be very soon in China (this year even according to some); after that coal usage flatten and start declining; all the way to a planned net zero in the 2060s.
The newer plants are designed to be more efficient, more flexible, and less polluting than the older ones. They are better at starting/stopping quickly/cheaply. Older coal plants used big boilers that had to heat up to build up steam before being able to generate power. This makes stopping and starting a plant slow and expensive. Because they consume a lot of fuel just to get the plant to the stage where it can actually generate power. The more often plants have to be stopped and started, the more wasteful this is. With the newer plants this is less costly and faster.
This makes them more suitable to be used in a non base load operational model where they can be spun up/down on a need to have basis. This is essential in a power grid that is dominated by the hundreds of GW of solar, wind, and battery.
As other posters below you have pointed out, it's not as simple as you make it out. You can't just stop building power plants overnight. The population and demands of China are growing and those needs need to be met immediately. There is no simpler, more understood way of rolling out new energy than building power plants.
But look at the data. They are building clean energy solutions at a faster rate than any other country on the planet - by a huge margin. Scaling clean energy solutions is what we need, and it has to be done alongside the gradual phase-out of coal and gas.
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.
It should also be mentioned that despite being the factory of the world, China's CO2 emissions per capita are nearly half of the United States and comparable to some European countries.
The goal of net energy exporter assumes that energy produced at one time can be exchange for energy produced at an other time for the same price, and that assumption has not been true in Europe for decades. You can be a net energy exporter and still be dependent energy imports for more than 50% of the energy a country consumes, as has been demonstrated by Denmark.
I will happily trade 10 unit of energy for just a single unit of energy, assuming I get to decide when I give the 10 units and when I can demand the 1 unit. A lot of profit in the European energy market can be made by such a "bad" deal.
The date when a country energy grid is free from fossil fuels, like coal, is when the grid has no longer any demand during the year for producing or importing energy produced by fossil fuels.
Somehow that’s an often missed aspect of this. Yeah, ditching coal has a wide array of nice side effects. It has killed many, many more than the world’s nuclear accidents.
It's worse than that, it's every 3 to 7 hours of fossil fuel pollution roughly equaling the total death toll of all nuclear power accidents in history (around 4000 indirectly, most from cancer resulting from Chernobyl - but there's only around 100 total in a direct way).
I think that depends on where you draw the line around the term "coal plant." There have been plenty of coal ash disasters that result in years of exclusion (for purposes of habitation, drinking water, fishing, etc.)[1][2][3][4]
And not all nuclear plants are the same. I don’t think it’s reasonable at all to compare Chernobyl to modern reactor designs, just because they both use the word “nuclear”.
Apso not sure if you are including coal mining, and all of the deaths and negative health outcomes as a result of the industry
If you look at net damage to the planet, fossil fuel burning energy sources kill literally 8 million+ people a year. Coal plants are vastly more radioactive than nuclear plants, and the effects of burning coal will have a vastly outsized share of damage to the planet in the long than nuclear. Its effects are just less concentrated to a single area.
Most of the exclusion zone is political nonsense. And overall coal has made much more areas much worse to live in. I rather live in the exclusion zone then next many coal plants.
Also there is a single case that happened from a non-western design. When looking at western countries like France, it shows how incredibly safe the whole industry is end to end.
Chernobyl's political nonsense was mostly down to the USSR wanting to deny that anything had, or possibly could, go wrong; if anything, the exclusion zone is the opposite of the western nonsense about nuclear power.
It's our unique freedom-themed nonsense, not the Soviet dictatorial-nonsense, which means we have radiation standards strict enough that it's not possible to convert a coal plant into a nuclear plant without first performing a nuclear decontamination process due to all the radioisotopes in the coal.
> When looking at western countries like France, it shows how incredibly safe the whole industry is end to end.
Relative to coal, absolutely. But don't assume western countries are immune to propaganda on these things, nuclear reactors are there for the spicy atoms, not the price tag or public safety.
Nuclear energy can be used to generate 24x7 energy as the grid-power to supply energy to a country whereas Solar and Wind require batteries.
I think that the last time I checked, when you take into factor the CO2 emissions and everything, Nuclear is the best source of Energy.
> I don’t think nuclear is the answer to things
I think that I am interested in seeing thorium based reactors or development with that too. That being said, Nuclear feels like the answer to me.
Feel free to correct me if you think I am wrong but I don't think that there is any better form of energy source than nuclear when you factor in everything.
Respectfully, Can you tell me more about it because I genuinely don't know how you think Nuclear energy is bad. It's one of the cleanest forms of energy.
Is there any particular reason why you think Nuclear is bad in all honesty as its worth having a discussion here? Why do you feel Nuclear Energy is a hazard?
I understand if you feel Chernobyl or any event makes it sound dangerous but rather, Please take a look at this data on the number of death rates per unit of electricity production[0]
Oil is roughly 615x more deadly than nuclear. Nuclear, Solar and Wind (the renewables) are all less deadly and are 0.03,0.02 and 0.04 respectively and nuclear is a reliable source of energy source which can be used in actual generation.
Nuclear is very much a green energy. I'd like to hear your opinion about it.
It's even more nuanced than that because the United States is made up of many different states, with many different energy policies. Ireland would most closely equate to the state of Massachusetts by population and economic size, and Massachusetts shut down its last coal plant almost a decade ago.
europes coal powerplants are in china, its polution is in china, the products of china are in europe and the producers from china live in europe and the us. China even offers greenwashing as a service, so people can buy for green notes a green consciousness.
> europes coal powerplants are in china, its polution is in china, the products of china are in europe and the producers from china live in europe and the us.
This is generally overstated. Emissions imported or exported via trade are significantly smaller than domestic emissions for almost every country. In the EU vs China case, accounting for imported/exported emissions basically changes which of the two is doing better, but emission levels are pretty close to begin with (US is already doing significantly worse than China either way).
For China, we are talking about ~1 ton/person/year from trade (in favor of China), while local emissions are at ~8 tons/person/year [1].
You make a valid point, but looking at the actual numbers it turns out that this makes (surprisingly) little difference.
This is what matters. The whole thing is an exercise in greenwashing. It doesn't matter if you stop burning coal in your own country, if the energy you import is also made by burning oil and gas.
The whole conversation about clean energy is polluted by the complete misunderstanding of the general population of how energy demands are balanced. Saying you're replacing coal and gas with wind is just nonsense. It's one solution to a bigger problem. The big problem is how to balance your grid across peaks and troughs and that requires a diverse set of clean energy solutions, with wind being one small part of it.
https://beyondfossilfuels.org/europes-coal-exit/ keeps track of coal phase-out commitments. 24 European countries still use coal generators, and 6 have not even planned to phase them out (Serbia, Moldova, Turkey, Poland, Kosovo, Bosnia).
Never used coal power:
Albania, Cyprus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Switzerland, Norway
Phased out:
2016: Belgium
2020: Sweden, Austria
2021: Portugal
2024: United Kingdom
2025: Ireland
Phase-out planned:
2026: Slovakia, Greece
2027: France
2028: Italy, Denmark
2029: The Netherlands, Hungary, Finland
2030: Spain, North Macedonia
2032: Romania
2033: Slovenia, Czechia, Croatia
2035: Ukraine
2038: Germany
2040: Bulgaria
2041: Montenegro
This is now how we should be looking at the problem. It doesn't matter if you burn coal yourself or not. What matters is the source of your energy. Every single one of those countries imports energy from other markets which consume fossil fuels for production.
> 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
Great to see, hopefully they can end turf burning too. (For those unaware it's basically where you take a wetland habitat that's also an amazing carbon store, cut it in to chunks, dry it out, and burn it for a very dirty heat source)
It will virtually end when it is no longer economically advantageous. In my mother's hometown in Mayo, most home heat was solid fuel, and it's gradually turning to electric heat pumps. The other alternative, heating oil, is very expensive and not renewable, but also used a lot. I think the turf is starting to run out because the use of it has gone way down. Either that or fewer homes have a legacy parcel of bog.
Unfortunately I think that's going to be very, very hard to sell to many people here in rural Ireland (Roscommon in my case). I would really love to see people stop burning turf but it's such a strong cultural thing that in some parts you'd be ostracised for even thinking the thought.
I've personally spoken to people (who are otherwise quite environmentally aware) who suggest they'd never vote for the Green Party because they'd take their turf away. It's a tough sell.
I think the domestic heating use is a drop in the bucket compared to commercial extraction of peat for export, or historical use for electricity generation.
I've only so many shits to give, and people heating their homes doesn't rank.
People heating their homes can be very sigificant. In the UK ~15% of all its territorial GHGs come from heating with gas: actual CO2 from the home boiler flues.
CO2 from small amounts of rural home heating is probably not the big thing to be worried about, especially if local recent biomass, eg wood from forest management. But there are still nasties (PMs, biodiversity losses, etc) to be considered and that should be dealt with in due course.
If you use Renewable Energy Sources, it may happen there will be no wind or no sun. So you need some auxiliary source of energy. If you want it at hand, this must be something with fast cold start. So black/brown coal power plan will not help you, similarly nuclear. You need to burn either gas or "biomass", that is wood/turf, etc. Those power plants have about 1h cold start.
Hence, in order to have RES you need to emit CO2. Deal with this. The other option, and UK goes that way, is to purchase electricity when it is lacking, paying spot prices, that's why they have such a big electricity bills, economy is down, people get mad and vote psychos.
The solution is dead simple, as France example shows. Simply use nuclear power plants and does not bother with RES, as it does not make any sense now.
Maybe, when we have technology to store efficiently electricity at scale, we can start using RES. But we just do not have that.
The end result now is that electricity in Europe is the most expensive on the World, so all manufacturing is moved to Asia, who does not bother with climate that much, that's why, despite all Europe efforts, overall CO2 emission keeps growing.
> If you use Renewable Energy Sources, it may happen there will be no wind or no sun
I still find it staggering that people feel like this is something that needs to be said as if it’s surprising or a novel idea. Do you really believe smart people haven’t been working through these challenges for decades?
Yet somehow we don't need a similar reminder for the possibility of fossil fuel power plants running out of fuel after a short time if not regularly restocked. Why is it worth bringing up one, but not the other?
> If you use Renewable Energy Sources, it may happen there will be no wind or no sun
If you have to import fuel, it may happen that no ships can get through. Or the fuel becomes too expensive to buy because of war, natural disasters, or market forces. Ain't nobody turning off the sun or wind.
> Maybe, when we have technology to store efficiently electricity at scale
> If you use Renewable Energy Sources, it may happen there will be no wind or no sun.
Yes, but this rarely happens, so any potential solution should be designed around it being idle 99% of the time.
> Those power plants have about 1h cold start.
Gas turbines can spin up significantly faster. However, the weather is quite predictable, so it is unlikely that this will be needed. Besides, battery storage is the perfect solution as an ultra-fast ramp-up holdover source until the turbines are at 100%.
> Hence, in order to have RES you need to emit CO2.
Or you equip the handful of gas turbines you use to make up for that 1% gap in renewables with carbon capture? It's not ideal, but it is very much doable.
> Simply use nuclear power plants and do not bother with RES
... and have your electricity be even more expensive?
Pumped storage hydro is extremely cheap and efficient and has been around for more than a century. LiFePo4 batteries are now cheap enough that they're a cost-competitive alternative. Flywheel storage plugs the inertia gap nicely.
The tech exists - it's mostly just a matter of political will. The economics already justify it. People are making considerable money by starting up BESSs (Battery Energy Storage Systems) and doing time arbitrage on energy.
cf. Iberia, who recently learned that effective storage and intertial pick-up is integral to a stable and efficient power network, and are now spending heavily on both.
It's a pipedream. Yes it's cheap and efficient, but it requires the geography and the will to destroy a local ecosystem.
BESS is what will ultimately win. It's pretty energy dense and it can be deployed on pretty much any junk land location. The only fight you'll have is with the neighbors who don't like it.
My power company, Idaho power, is deploying a 200MWh BESS on a slice of land they've owned for decades near one of their substations. The hardest part has been the permitting (which is now done).
To cover Europe's need you only need to build 70 1.5 GW hydroelectric stations at a cost of $92 billion (in reality much higher) while greatly damaging ecology in large areas.
> this must be something with fast cold start. So black/brown coal power plan will not help you, similarly nuclear.
Nuclear plants provide base load and they are extremely fast at ramping up/lowering production. All modern nuclear plants are capable of changing power output at 3-5% of nameplate capacity per minute: https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2021-12...
You don't shut down power plants. None of the power plants ever do a "fast cold start"
> The end result now is that electricity in Europe is the most expensive on the World, so all manufacturing is moved to Asia
The production moved to Asia due to extremely cheap labor, not due to electricity costs.
5% per minute is not extremely fast. Simple cycle gas turbine (peaker) plants routinely go 0 to 100% in less than 10 minutes. Nuclear plants can only hit 5% per minute in the 50 to 100% interval (per your own source).
And all of this is confused by the way the nuclear industry uses the term "load following". You'd think it means "changing the power output from moment to moment to match electricity demand" but for nuclear plants it means "changing from one pre-planned constant level to another pre-planned constant level, up to four times per day".[0] There are only three[1] sources of electricity that can be ramped freely enough to exactly match demand: hydro, simple-cycle gas turbines and batteries. All electrical supplies will need some of those three mixed in. Which is why France is still 10% hydro and 10% natural gas in their electricity supply.
0: Some of the most modern Russian plants can move to +-20% of their current target at 10% per minute, but "the number of such very fast
power variations is limited, and they are mainly reserved for emergency situations." per your source.
1: OK, there are some obsolete ways too, like diesel generators. At least obsolete at the scale of the electricity grid.
For the foreseeable future, building enough nuclear for peak capacity is exceedingly expensive.
> None of the power plants ever do a "fast cold start"
Somewhere in each grid you will have “black start” capacity contracts, dunno if nuclear can fills this role (or if grids exclude nukes for one reason or another).
Plenty of peaker plants built with the intention of running double digit hours per year and therefore the tradeoff supports being largely “off” in between those calls. Batteries might fill that gap.
> Nuclear plants provide base load and they are extremely fast at ramping up/lowering production
The obvious counterexample is Chernobyl, where a big contributor was the fact that they were unable to scale it down & back up as desired. Yes, nuclear reactors can scale down rapidly - but you have to wait several hours until it can scale back up!
Besides, the linked paper only covers load-following in a traditional grid (swinging between 60% and 100% once a day) and barely touches on the economic effects. The situation is going to look drastically different for a renewables-first grid, where additional sources are needed for at most a few hours a day, for a few months per year.
> You don't shut down power plants. None of the power plants ever do a "fast cold start"
There's a lot of misinformation and misunderstanding of the global energy supply presented around me nowadays. I would urge anyone to stop what they're doing and read "Clearing the Air" [1]. It's completely reshaped my understanding of this problem, and I am far more optimistic after reading it.
It addresses key questions such as "What about China?" and "Can we stop it?"
Ireland is a net energy importer who imports electricity from Great Britain. She, in turn, often imports from nations including France, Holland, and Denmark, who use coal power.
As such, it's not really the whole story to call Ireland, "coal-free". It's the same as America outsourcing heavy manufacturing or chemicals to China and claiming environmental victory. It's true in a narrow construction of the concept; it does reduce the burden on one's own country. It is false in the sense of one's contribution to the global commons and externalizes those externalities previously more internalized. It is, in other words, a shell game. Ireland's dependence on imported energy continues to rise and the number continues to tick up on the books of other nations and down on hers, with her people paying the "guilt premium" associated with this accounting trick. They're not exactly dirty grids, but the fact remains, Ireland still relies to some extent on coal.
Also note that, though she is building OCGTs and fast CCGTs elsewhere, she converted Moneypoint not to gas but to heavy fuel oil. HFO is quite dirty stuff, only a dozen or so per cent cleaner than the coal it replaces per Ireland's own EIS. This is likely influenced by the fact that the plant was specced to burn some of the cleaner thermal coal on the market, largely from Glencore's Cerrejon mine, with pretty low sulfur and ash relative to others. So, the delta from relatively clean coal (excuse the expression) to some of the dirtiest oil; large boilers like that are likely burning No. 5 or 6, aka bunker B or C in marine. Not sure if you've ever seen this stuff but it's the next thing from tar.
Ireland could instead have chosen to pull in gas from the North Sea and reduced the emissions of Moneypoint by not twelve but fifty to sixty per cent with modern CCGTs. Even older, more readily-available OCGTs would give thirty to forty per cent. This is ~250mmcf, i.e. probably a 24" spur line. Though this likely necessitates a few hundred km of loop for the ring main to the west, it's less than a year's work with a competent American crew.
Instead, she chose a paltry twelve per cent a few years earlier; when the other gas peaker capacity is installed, cooling infra and existing thermal plant talent base while paying to reconstitute all those on the other side of the island.
None of this is to say Ireland's work on decarbonizing her grid isn't real, but "coal-free" rather tends to obscure the present state of things; it is generally understood to make a strong, binary truth claim that isn't subject to "mostly" and implies one is no longer dependent on coal. It therefore demands consideration of electricity's fungibility in a grid.
Ireland imports less than 10% of it's electricity from the UK. The UK _already_ decommissioned it's coal-based eletricity production. The UK imports roughly 14% of it's electricity, and most of those imports are from nuclear and hydro-electric power.
No, it isn't. Power in a grid is fungible so grids operate based off consumption-based accounting. Britain continues to import at times from countries still burning coal. As such, Ireland is not free of coal dependence. It's really that simple. It is accurate for Ireland to say she no longer directly burns coal, no longer operates coal power, but the common understanding of "coal-free" is, "we are no longer directly dependent on coal for our lights to turn on." That simply isn't the case.
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.
I am not sure it's a matter of how you frame the issue, to be honest, although I have seen this argument used quite a lot.
100% renewables is the exact opposite of "100% non-renewables" and that's including also oil, gas, etc. So "coal" is only a part of the 100% non renewables, but it seems your goal is to get rid of all the non renewables.
And here the question is: why would you want a single goal? Why 100% renewable?
What drives us should be: save where it makes sense, don't where it doesn't. Iterate every 10 years and recheck.
All these single radical goals are literally killing our economy and society. And I am not just talking about coal free or renewable.
Even the "let's tear down the windfarms" is dumb because it's radical and non sense.
Or unrelated, even this "we need to digitalize everything" (although given our jobs we would profit the most) can lead to a lot of problems (privacy, security, etc).
I don't know why we have become so radical in the last 20 years.
Coal is about as dirty as it gets (besides peat and lignite). _Even if you were not reducing CO2 output_, getting rid of coal would be greatly beneficial as you'd reduce COPD and other lung diseases.
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.
Dirty power generation, and dirty toxic hazardous industry in general, discriminate against the poor and minorities. That carries an enormous social cost that goes uncounted in discussions like the ones on this thread.
Nuclear discriminates against capitalism. The cost makes the choice of nuclear irrational. The inability to insure nuclear in the private market makes it a travesty of free markets.
Definitely a step in the right direction, but believe it or not-- I overheard a customer in Aldi asking for coal only last week! I couldn't believe it, the staff member didn't know where to send them
China is building solar panels at a record pace, and building wind turbines at a record pace, and building nuclear power plants at a record pace. Meanwhile, the construction rate of coal plants has been dropping over the last decade and a half.
China is not - Chinas coal consumption is stagnating with about zero growth from 2024 to 2025.
China is far more serious than the EU about the green transition. Despite being poorer than the poorest EU country they are dominating renewable deployment.
I think that attitude is poorly informed whataboutism.
They build new coal plants as a backup, or to replace existing older plants. But they're very clearly not using them more than they already were. They burn coal because they have coal, just like the US burns gas because the fracking boom made gas cheap.
I think they'll follow China's lead soon. The economics are inevitable. Ember projects India will be at 42% renewable electricity by 2030, up from 10% today. This is obviously staggering renewables growth in a poor country.
Both India and China lack oil. Reducing fossil fuel usage is a national security issue for them. They're also poorer. As solar and wind become the cheapest sources of electricity, thanks mostly to China, they're going to rapidly transition. No dumb political games.
I understand that American shale gas (the largest fraction of LNG imports to the EU) is by certain measures as polluting as coal. If correct, Europe needs to reconsider if the price (and political) volatility is really worth it.
They'd be better off with (and are building out) offshore and onshore wind. If you've ever been to the west coast of Ireland you'll know they've got almost unlimited wind energy. The country is targeting 5GW of capacity by 2030 and 37GW in the distant future[1].
If only they could harness the power of rain, Ireland would truly be an energy superpower.
> If only they could harness the power of rain, Ireland would truly be an energy superpower.
I know this is in jest, but that's basically "dam up some valley rivers and put a hydroelectric generator on the end", and unfortunately Ireland isn't so good for that. (It's not just the physical geology, it's also all the people living in the places you'd flood).
Hydro as a battery is easier and works in far more locations, but that's not harnessing the power *of rain*.
But yes, Ireland and the UK have an absolutely huge wind power resource available around them, IIRC enough to supply all of Europe if the grid connections were there to export it all.
There has been a lot of proposals to dam up massive unpopulated sea-facing valleys in Mayo and Donegal and use pumped hydro with seawater. Was a bit topic 15 years ago, but never happened. All that happened was the silvermines pump hydro plant that seems behind schedule.
Ireland briefly had the biggest hydroelectric dam in the world until the Hoover dam was built… but that was before electricity production really took off. Ireland doesn’t really have the geography for dams, the hills and rivers are far too small.
Onshore wind in England was de-facto but not de-jure banned by the Tories in 2018, due to a footnote inserted in their National Planning Policy Framework. Labour removed this footnote in 2024, immediately after winning the election. [0]
Offshore wind was never affected, nor onshore wind in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland.
The 'sell electricity to Ireland' bit here is doing an awful lot of work. It's more complicated than that.
For those who don't know, Ireland operates an all-island grid, and EirGrid (the grid operator for the Republic) owns SONI (the grid operator for Northern Ireland). That means that 'UK' and 'Ireland' in this has a large Northern Ireland shaped lump of ambiguity that statement.
Tories during 2015-2023 made construction of new onshore wind farms all but impossible (removed subsidies and made planning permissions very difficult). I would assume Labor could reverse these polices but haven't seen anything in news about this.
crude oil and petroleum products (37.7%)
natural gas (20.4%)
renewable energy (19.5%)
solid fuels (10.6%)
nuclear energy (11.8%)
(2023 numbers)
So natural gas was just barely more than renewables in 2023, but according to the source below the line was crossed in 2025 and renewables now provide more than all fossil fuels put together:
For those following along at home, it appears enir is (edit: as well as using EU wide data, not Irish data..) including non-electricity generation, or non-grid, energy use. Grid stats available here https://www.seai.ie/data-and-insights/seai-statistics/electr...
In 2000, coal was about 20% of the energy mix, gas another 20%, oil about 50%. Wind was 0%. In 2024 coal was about 2%, gas still 20%, oil still 50%, but wind grew to about 15%. It seems that wind actually replaced coal. It is not only logical, but good, that wind first replaced coal (dirtiest), and maybe from now on is will start to replace oil. Only after many decades, or maybe never, gas will be replaced.
Primary energy compared to electricity as energy. The first adds energy used in driving, chemical industry etc. the second is just the amount of electricity generated.
Not everyone is supposed to read every single news. There will always be someone who didn't see it, but that is not my point.
It would feel weird to see this as a headline on a newspaper or on TV today, but maybe that is just me and people like to read new that are from last year.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is such a shit, classist take. It shouldn’t surprise me, after all I’m on a forum where people are all too happy to sell their souls to the likes of Alphabet and Meta for those juicy comps, but, even so, to fail to understand how come higher energy prices are fucking up the poors and the low-middle-classes is beyond stupid.
This argument that we have to self destruct to have the moral highground just keeps getting repeated, for maybe two decades now.
We, as in the West, got there first because we are luckier/better organised/evil colonialists/whatever, take your pick it doesn't matter.
China DGAF about our self perceived virtuousness, they know windpower and solar are not viable long term, they're just happy to sell us more panels and propellers like any other widget from a factory with a profit margin. Web search how many Chinese coal plants came online in the last six months.
That’s why they are installing it all over their country at the fastest pace of any country by far? That’s why they probably hit peak oil consumption?
The coal thing is complicated in China. They are replacing many old coal stations, local governments are fearful of being caught short in a cold winter which has happened. Rate of coal consumption increases is slowing. Peak coal may have happened last year.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-why-china-is-still-bu...
Hopefully this new info might help change your views.
>"China is the world's top electricity producer from renewable energy sources. China's renewable energy capacity is growing faster than its fossil fuels and nuclear power capacity.[1] China installed over 373 GW of renewables in 2024, reaching a total installed renewable capacity of 1,878 GW by the end of the year. The country aims to have 80% of its total energy mix come from non-fossil fuel sources by 2060, and achieve a combined 1,200 GW of solar and wind capacity by 2030.[1]
>Although China currently has the world's largest installed capacity of hydro, solar and wind power, its energy needs are so large that some fossil fuel sources are still used."
Seems more renewables came online than non-renewables, perhaps your take is outdated?
I did and it was actually very few. In 2024 88% of new electricity in China came from solar and wind. https://www.eia.gov/international/analysis/country/chn
You should try doing some research instead of lying.
And are you sure about your claim? Every time I hear anything about China and Solar the core of it is that solar in China is growing more than anywhere else on the planet ( 40% increase in 2025 and creating ~11% of China's energy already )
And that there is no sign of that trend slowing down anytime soon. And why would it. Solar panels are dirt cheap and they have more than enough space for it.
China is also really strong in the battery space, so they have everything they need to ditch oil/coal eventually
Everything is geopolitical now. Expect the hawks to look at the "success" of Iran and move on to bombing China soon.
https://apnews.com/article/china-climate-solar-wind-carbon-e...
Why?
By 2020 it was obvious that wind & solar were viable long term, so investments in nuclear et al dried up. But they weren't convinced that batteries were viable long term, so they built a lot of coal peakers for night power.
By 2025 it became obvious that batteries were more viable and cheaper than coal peakers, so they've started to build battery storage at a vast scale.
So steelman is that the OP's viewpoint is ~10 years out of date.
The huge energy price spikes are down to wars in Ukraine (gas, which is also used for electricity production) and the Middle East.
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...
"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.
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...)
https://www.ft.com/content/86fdb9e4-3db4-4e4f-8e47-580a1fad2...
Made some reasonable points imo
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.
Source for this claim? figures show 10-15% of power is imported, not "most", and those fluctuate with wind generation.
> 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.
So that's already outstripped by renewables (42% in 2025). So renewables have enabled local production to reach more than double the share that peat ever managed.
(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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[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
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.
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.
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...
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%
Commercial—0.8 MMst—0.2%Getting down to 6% of our current coal use would be amazing. So much lung cancer and asthma would be prevented.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/coal/use-of-coal.php
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.
Never used coal power:
Phased out: Phase-out planned:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Estonia#Oil-shale
> 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.).
I've personally spoken to people (who are otherwise quite environmentally aware) who suggest they'd never vote for the Green Party because they'd take their turf away. It's a tough sell.
I've only so many shits to give, and people heating their homes doesn't rank.
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.
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.
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?
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)
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.
> 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.
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...
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 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.
Your entire comment is incredibly misleading.
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.
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.
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.
Poland I guess?
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.
China is far more serious than the EU about the green transition. Despite being poorer than the poorest EU country they are dominating renewable deployment.
I think that attitude is poorly informed whataboutism.
In 2024 88% of new electricity in China came from renewables. https://www.eia.gov/international/analysis/country/chn
They build new coal plants as a backup, or to replace existing older plants. But they're very clearly not using them more than they already were. They burn coal because they have coal, just like the US burns gas because the fracking boom made gas cheap.
India is not doing as well as China but it is still improving. In 2024 64% of electricity growth came from coal, but that's down from 91% in 2023. https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/india/
I think they'll follow China's lead soon. The economics are inevitable. Ember projects India will be at 42% renewable electricity by 2030, up from 10% today. This is obviously staggering renewables growth in a poor country.
The same source projects the US will be at 59% by then https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/united-states... and it's already at 58% today. So basically 0 renewables growth in the richest country in the world.
Both India and China lack oil. Reducing fossil fuel usage is a national security issue for them. They're also poorer. As solar and wind become the cheapest sources of electricity, thanks mostly to China, they're going to rapidly transition. No dumb political games.
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-...
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.
... 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.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/interactive-publications/e...
(2023 numbers)So natural gas was just barely more than renewables in 2023, but according to the source below the line was crossed in 2025 and renewables now provide more than all fossil fuels put together:
https://electrek.co/2026/01/21/wind-and-solar-overtook-fossi...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47308462
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://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
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.