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

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...

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?

That they have the internal political means to get large infrastructure projects done is laudible - they can actually build transmission lines that make unreliable energy sources like solar and wind feasible. In the US that is effectively impossible due to the NIMBY legal situation.

That they lead in battery production is going to be pretty interesting to watch. I admit I was skeptical that current battery tech could be scaled up enough to make it financially doable, but China is very close to making me wrong on the topic. If they can be the first to truly seasonal storage that works without hand-waving games like pretending you can "just use another source" when you run out of storage I'll be very impressed.

They seem to understand that you need to back unreliable sources with reliable sources - and have the political means to build a coal plant that will sit idle 95% of the time.

No other country is close - it's parlor tricks at the moment. China seems to understand how energy works, and that you need a reliable grid to run an industrial economy. They are very much being pragmatic in how they are building out everything they possibly can. The West has forgotten this.

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.