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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)

#591

Post by asdff »

invalidusernam3 wrote: post #232
redfloatplane wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bec…

How much impact does it realistically have on climate change? I would expect it to be relatively small compared to things like owning a car? In a perfect world we would want to reduce emissions as much as possible in every facet of life, but in the real world I think we should pick battles that have the biggest impact.

Might be one of those situations where globally it is irrelevant but heavily fouls up local air due to geography or prevailing airflow patterns.

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

#592

Post by Qwertious »

uriahlight wrote: post #561
deanc wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 coal & gas power plants. But look at the data. They are building clean energy solutions at a faster rate than…

[flagged]

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

#593

Post by ggm »

renhanxue wrote: post #189
bramhaag wrote: post #45

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…

For Sweden, the coal plants were exclusively for cogeneration (district heating with electricity as a byproduct) and only used as peaker plants in winter. Some of them still exist but have been converted to burn biofuels instead, mostly woodchips and other byproducts from the forestry industry. For most practical purposes, Swedish electricity generation has been basically fossile free since the 1980's.

I may be wrong, but I believe the british experience with biofuels is that although you want to believe its surplus byproduct, the cheapest source is often grown to be fuel for a biofuel generator. It's like soy/corn for ethanol, it isn't sufficiently profitable to do this solely with waste product, you get better margins growing to fulfill the contract.

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

#594

Post by p0w3n3d »

bananzamba wrote: post #34
reedf1 wrote: 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

Overall Result (Typical Modern Coal Plant)

When multiple systems are combined the percentage of things filtered out is:

Pollutant Typical removal Dust / particulate matter 99–99.9%+ Sulfur dioxide (SO₂) 90–98% Nitrogen oxides (NOx) 70–90% Mercury 80–95%

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

#595

Post by RalfWausE »

nomel wrote: post #536
munk-a wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trump had a few executive orders that derailed phase out plans and the DoE released a coal plant refurbishing subsidy[1]. 1. https://www.energy.gov/articles/energy-department-announces-...

So, in both cases it's helping sustain. "Ramping up" means increasing . Is there something I'm missing here?

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

#596

Post by kenferry »

realaaa wrote: post #556

I don't know why it has to be black & white - modern coal plants I am sure are less pollutant than renewables once you factor in total costs of installation & replacement etc

…why would you assume that?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse_gas_emis...

Coal, with any available technology, is more polluting than any renewable energy source. Full life cycle including plant installation included.

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

#597

Post by jahnu »

selfmodruntime wrote: post #537
jahnu wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes Ireland is rich. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/median-in...

Not according to your own source

It’s literally the 19th richest country in that source. Unless you have more to offer than contradiction I have nothing more for you. Have a good one!

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

#598

Post by t0bia_s »

triceratops wrote: post #567
hihitsdumb wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you manufacture it locally, with a fully local supply chain, wind and solar are still susceptible to world events.

Is someone turning off the wind and sun? Once the infrastructure is installed it produces energy for years. Solar panels aren't burned to make energy, like oil or gas are. And you can recycle them.

You need tons of oil to lubricate wind turbines.

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

#599

Post by AnthonyMouse »

pydry wrote: post #510
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Fuel storage and reprocessing" isn't that much of the cost and a significant proportion of that is compliance costs and extreme safety measures. The pressure vessel is likewise a small minority of the cost. Industrial control systems are fundamentally sensors, actuators and a computer. None of those is actually that expensive. Nobody should be paying a billion dollars for a valve. Older reactors have somewhat high o…

Fuel storage and reprocessing isnt where vast majority of of the cost is for nuclear power, construction and decommissioning are. These are what makes it cost 5x solar or wind.

"Decommissioning costs" are essentially bad math. Here's this again:

https://www.ourworldofenergy.com/images/electrical-power-gen...

Nuclear, inclusive of construction costs: ~$181/MWh, only better than natural gas because no CO2. Nuclear, cost of continuing to operate an existing reactor once it's already built: $31/MWh, basically the cheapest thing on the market, half the cost of continuing to operate an existing natural gas plant (because you need so much less fuel).

What this implies is that if you build a nuclear plant you're going to want to continue operating it for 80 years, and even then you probably want to just modernize it again instead of actually decommissioning it.

The long-term average returns from ordinary investments (e.g. S&P 500) are ~10%/year, implying that even if you require decommissioning to be prefunded (unlike any competing form of power generation), the amount of money you need is less than 0.05% of what the cost will be in 80 years. Adding $500 million in decommissioning costs isn't $500M in net present costs, it's only $250 thousand in net present costs, because you take the $250k and add 80 years worth of interest (1.10^80) which multiplies your starting capital by more than a factor of 2000.

It's really just the construction, and that's in significant part because you have to build more of them to get economies of scale for building them.

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

#600

Post by [deleted] »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #247
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…

Lots of signal that this top post is now an LLM an not "an Irish man". The generous use of dashes to complete the thought process..have a look: https://www.dcaulfield.com/chatgpt-learning-dev See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47291513

[deleted]
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