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

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

#421

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

linksnapzz wrote: post #418
bryanlarsen wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Coal is cheap, abundant, energy dense. Coal is neither cheap nor abundant in Ireland.

Coal is cheap and abundant in the English Midlands, which explains much of the industrial revolution starting there. Said collieries, which if put back into service, would be able to cheaply get coal to Ireland via barge at no great cost or latency.

The UK's deep mines would be spectacularly uneconomic. Some have been sealed permanently (for expensive values of permanent) and the supporting knowledge and infrastructure would have to be rebuilt.

Coal makes as much sense as a modern fuel as horse drawn buses do for transport.

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

#422

Post by moominpapa »

zahlman wrote: post #410
moominpapa wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, are China still building coal power stations? https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-why-china-is-still-bu...

Per your own source : 1. There are coordination issues that have caused them to overestimate the need for such plants, which have been running at low capacity. There have also been perverse incentives to build plants that weren't needed, in order to placate the relevant stakeholders. 2. Battery storage (including pumped hydro) is being pursued aggressively, specifically (among other things) to address the reliability…

Meant to say, it seems like China need to get some people over from Ireland to help them out

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

#423

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

idiotsecant wrote: post #416
ljf wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which to we ignore for coal? Cost to build a new plant? Cost to run? The decommissioning costs? (Yes we ignore the externalities, and no I don't think we should burn coal. My point is Nuclear has yet to pay its way anywhere in the world, without heavy heavy govt support - far exceeding that given to renewables) Some figures on running costs: Coal costs about £62 per MWh - (£31 for the coal and £31 for the CO2 premium…

>Which to we ignore for coal? Cost to build a new plant? Cost to run? The decommissioning costs? (Yes we ignore the externalities, and no I don't think we should burn coal. My point is Nuclear has yet to pay its way anywhere in the world, without heavy heavy govt support - far exceeding that given to renewables) Yes, all three. Building a nuke plant without the additional concern for outcome that we put on nuke would…

A nuke plant is concrete, pumps, fuel storage and (re)processing, a huge pressure vessel, some very complex moderator machinery, and some of the most complex industrial plant control on the planet.

Even if you ramped down the safety, it still wouldn't be cheap or simple.

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

#425

Post by jodrellblank »

NamlchakKhandro wrote: post #288
turtlesdown11 wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard to see past the scientific consensus on global warming

[flagged]

On the one hand there are scientists who say it is happening.

On the other hand there are sock-puppets for oil billionaires who say it isn't happening.:

"Established in 2015, the CO2 Coalition is dedicated to “educating thought leaders, policy makers, and the public about the important contribution made by carbon dioxide to our lives and the economy.” The Coalition has received funding from the Koch brothers — the right-wing libertarian U.S. oil billionaires who have been at the heart of climate change denial in the United States"

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

#426

Post by linksnapzz »

baron816 wrote: post #344
bryanlarsen wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Coal is cheap, abundant, energy dense. Coal is neither cheap nor abundant in Ireland.

Coal also isn’t really energy dense since so much of the energy is wasted when converting to electricity

Rankine cycle efficiency can be up to 45%; monocrystalline solar panels ~25%? I suppose you aren't paying for the sunshine, but if cloudy days affected coal power, James Watt wouldn't be famous.

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

#427

Post by array_key_first »

cauliflower99 wrote: post #70

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…

Coal is the most expensive form of power still widely used and it's not even close.

Coal is literally just bad. It's hard as hell to transport, it's extremely inefficient to burn, and it produces a shit ton of harmful byproducts you have to clean up.

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

#428

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

Spooky23 wrote: post #299
jahnu wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 endless…

It's really not. Energy grids are not designed for distributed generation. In my US state, that means billions of infrastructure investment. The people using carbon to create forcing functions to transition to renewables conveniently forget to mention that. Which sucks, as solar in particular is almost a miracle product, but at this point my delivery charges to get electricity exceed the electricity supply by 10%. 20…

Renewables run on competent government.

If you don't have competent government, that's not the fault of renewables.

This is not snark. With forward-looking rational planning the transition could have started decades ago, and we could have had a low carbon energy economy by 2010 at the latest.

But fossils make so much money they can buy the policy they want, and here we are arguing about national tactics instead of planetary strategy.

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

#429

Post by dylan604 »

cguess wrote: post #363
dylan604 wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Only if you ignore all externalities Do not discount how easy that is to do. Your list is of costs not to any bottom line of a company with bean counters. Those external costs are out side the scope of their concerns. Your list of concerns would be something for C-suite types, but the pressure of stock prices again make the external costs easy to set aside.

Sure, but as a consumer you can also care about these things.

Sure, but there's only so many places to buy electricity from

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

#430

Post by jodrellblank »

gadders wrote: post #319
cauliflower99 wrote: post #70

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…

Same in the UK. Instead of us generating electricity via coal, we get other people to do it less cleanly and import it instead. That way our hands are clean.

No.

Our biggest interconnect is with France which is 72% nuclear. Currently importing 3GW from them.

Our second biggest is with Norway which is 88% hydroelectric. Currently importing 1.7GW from them.

We're importing 0.2GW from Belgium which is partly gas and partly nuclear.

We're exporting power to Ireland, The Netherlands and Denmark.

Imports is 6-7% of current UK grid power. Most of our power comes from us burning North Sea gas.

[1] https://grid.iamkate.com/

[2] https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/live/fifteen_minutes

https://grid.iamkate.com/

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