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Ireland shuts last coal plant, becomes 15th coal-free country in Europe (2025)

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31–40 of 712 posts

Re: Ireland shuts last coal plant, becomes 15th coal-free country in Europe (2025)

#31
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think turf (peat) has been burned for energy generation since 2023.

True, I was referring to domestic heat in rural areas.

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.

Re: Ireland shuts last coal plant, becomes 15th coal-free country in Europe (2025)

#32
post #27

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.

It's more nuanced than that. This article is about the US (a worse polluter than Ireland), but it shows only about a small difference because of offshoring emissions: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/no-the-us-didnt-outsource-our-...

Re: Ireland shuts last coal plant, becomes 15th coal-free country in Europe (2025)

#34
post #27

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.

Air quality will improve, just not CO2

Re: Ireland shuts last coal plant, becomes 15th coal-free country in Europe (2025)

#35
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Natural gas is still the leader by a good margin.

Leading is not the same as replacing. See this figure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Ireland#/media/File:... In 2000, coal was about 20% of the energy mix, gas another 20%, oil about 50%. Wind was 0%. In 2024 coal was about 2%, gas still 20%, oil still 50%, but wind grew to about 15%. It seems that wind actually replaced coal. It is not only logical, but good, that wind first replaced coal (dirtiest), and ma…

I'm not sure where that data comes from. Oil was only around 3% in 2024.

https://www.seai.ie/data-and-insights/seai-statistics/electr...

Re: Ireland shuts last coal plant, becomes 15th coal-free country in Europe (2025)

#36

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)

Can't beat a good turf fire though!

Re: Ireland shuts last coal plant, becomes 15th coal-free country in Europe (2025)

#38

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)

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.

Re: Ireland shuts last coal plant, becomes 15th coal-free country in Europe (2025)

#39
post #27

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.

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.

Re: Ireland shuts last coal plant, becomes 15th coal-free country in Europe (2025)

#40
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, I was referring to domestic heat in rural areas.

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.

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