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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)

#201

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

Dannymetconan wrote: post #191
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…

| more and more cost-of-living protests 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 en…

> 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.

It's grid capacity more than anything which is the issue, and (like many other Irish issues) this is downstream of failures in our planning and permitting process.

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

#202

Post by happosai »

wolvoleo wrote: post #71
nixass wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coal probably kills more people in a single day than all nuclear accidents ever combined

Probably but damage from nuclear accidents isn't only measured in deaths. No coal plant accident has caused an exclusion zone for 40 years.

Exclusion zones are great for nature:

https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/how-chernobyl-ha...

So The "worst case scenario" for nuclear power is creating a new wildlife park free from human interference.

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

#203

Post by saltysalt »

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…

Another Irishman here, completely agree with your comment. My domestic gas and electric bills have never been higher, insane inflation for nothing more than political virtue signalling.

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

#204

Post by Dannymetconan »

Spooky23 wrote: post #146
jahnu wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This attitude is ill informed. 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…

If this stuff is cheaper, why are prices going up?

21% of all energy is now being consumed by data centers with not enough investment in new forms of energy generation.

This is a policy decision by the government. More realistically it is a decision to not proactively do anything and instead rely on market prices to encourage new entrants to the market.

https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-dcmec/dat...

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

#205

Post by s_dev »

landl0rd wrote: post #165

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 do…

Ireland is building the Celtic Interconnector with France next, will import a lot of her electricity from there which predominately uses nuclear power to generate her electricity. I fear you're making perfect the enemy of better and genuine progress.

https://www.eirgrid.ie/celticinterconnector

Ireland has lots of problems including energy generation but you're not being fair in citing significant progress having been made here.

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

#206

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

jahnu wrote: post #94
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…

This attitude is ill informed. 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…

> 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.

Sorry, what? While I agree with you about reducing emissions, most of our transition from poor to rich(er) was driven by capital light businesses. To be fair, the pharma companies did come here because we refused to regulate spillovers up to EU standards, but that's less than half of the story.

tl;dr loads of golf courses, english speaking population, smart industrial plannng and tax dodging was really how it happened.

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

#207

Post by jodrellblank »

sunaookami wrote: post #107
ceejayoz wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why even make it about nuclears vs coal? Both are bad, both are hazards and both are not green energy.

Because coal desposits in the ground have bits of Uranium and Thorium which are radioactive, they get concentrated in coal fly ash, and blow out the chimney in the smoke from a coal power plant, and kill people, they leach into the soil and waterways, and kill people.

That is, nuclear power plants only kill people by radioactivity in the case of an accident. Coal power plants do it in normal operation. As well as coal dust having a PM2.5 dust problem which kills people.

Make it about nuclear vs coal because people say coal is better than nuclear because it's not scary radiation, and it actually is.

> "Both are bad"

Nuclear generates more power from a Kg of fuel, with less CO2 pollution and fewer deaths. It's not bad, but even if it was bad it's not "both sides", it's much less bad.

[yes coal disasters also kill hundreds of people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aberfan_disaster ]

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

#208

Post by ZeroGravitas »

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…

The actual causes of electricity cost rises in Ireland being higher than Europe are:

Lower population density on a grid without good connections to neighbours.

Previous underinvestment in network infrastructure.

Gas price rises combined with Ireland having less renewables that the EU average (middle of the pack for electricity, 3rd from bottom on total energy).

Maybe saving the world a bit harder would have helped keep prices down. It's certain that building more renewables now is the likeliest path to cheaper electricity.

A report supporting those claims: https://www.nerinstitute.net/sites/default/files/research/89...

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

#209

Post by landl0rd »

s_dev wrote: post #205
landl0rd wrote: post #165

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 do…

Ireland is building the Celtic Interconnector with France next, will import a lot of her electricity from there which predominately uses nuclear power to generate her electricity. I fear you're making perfect the enemy of better and genuine progress. https://www.eirgrid.ie/celticinterconnector Ireland has lots of problems including energy generation but you're not being fair in citing significant progress having been…

I'm not the enemy of this progress at all and think it's a good thing. Same goes for the Celtic Interconnecter, though. My point is basically a) "coal-free" is misleading and this progress can be framed in other ways, and b) Ireland would have been better-served in terms of cost and environment to rely on even OCGTs than HFO.

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

#210

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

AdamN wrote: post #171
Spooky23 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this stuff is cheaper, why are prices going up?

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 g…

> You would have to normalize against other costs and do a deep dive to really understand.

The tricky part here is that energy is an input to basically everything. It's a major (through fertiliser) input to food, and then all of transport and stocking of said food which tends to be how energy changes influence downstream inflation. So I think you'd probably need a deeper analysis to tease out these issues.

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