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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)

#301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is to incentivise the cheapest production methods to be invested in. It's also just a rule of economics. The price is set at the cost of the most expensive production necessary to meet demand. So if solar could fulfill 100% of energy demand, price would be the cost of solar, and any other more expensive generation would either lose money, shut down or idle. But if we shut down or idle those today we wouldn't h…

... So then why isn't the solar to replace the more expensive plants getting built?

Snarky response deleted.

That rule is a rule of free markets. Electricity is not a free market, so it only partially applies. Texas is closer to a free market, and unsurprisingly it is adopting solar faster than most.

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

#302
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…

> 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 he…

> Now we are rich it’s only fair we lead in transitioning to renewables

Unfortunately it's not the people/generation who reaped the rewards from cheap energy and polluting who are now being made to feel the pain of the transition.

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

#303
Highest[1] base electricity price in the EU, some of the worst conditions for solar generation, a war in Iran, and now they've closed the coal plant. Great. Guess I'll just go bankrupt.

Edit: instead of downvoting my post, feel free to pay my electric bill, lol

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

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

#304
post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-consumption-by-count... China is the world's top consumer of coal, and accounts for more than 50% of the world's total consumption of coal.

People keep forgetting in all the China-posting that China is a country of 1.4 billion people, approximately 256 times the size of the Irish population, and therefore it's not really surprising when it tops a "top consumption" or "top production" list of any kind. (second most populous after India) Alternatively, if all Ireland was a city in China, it would not be in the list of top 50 cities by population.

India has bigger population than China.

India is building 41 coal plant, China is building 289. India approved 5 more plants, China approved 405. China is building more coal power than all other countries combined including India.

This thread is crazy. guys just look at numbers first...

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

#305
post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ke…

> The actual causes of electricity cost rises in Ireland being higher than Europe are Wrong comparison. Most of Europe has way too high electricity prices. It seems logical that ending the use of existing coal energy infrastructure puts upward pressure on prices. Coal is cheap, abundant, energy dense. Yes, burning coal causes lots of problems and I support ending it's use, but this is besides the point.

If you don't count the externalities, sure. Healthcare is a cost too. We need more holistic accounting, the financialising of everything into a tidy but ultimately false P&L column is literally killing us.

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

#306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is to incentivise the cheapest production methods to be invested in. It's also just a rule of economics. The price is set at the cost of the most expensive production necessary to meet demand. So if solar could fulfill 100% of energy demand, price would be the cost of solar, and any other more expensive generation would either lose money, shut down or idle. But if we shut down or idle those today we wouldn't h…

... So then why isn't the solar to replace the more expensive plants getting built?

Because at the moment wind has been the winner in the Irish climate, especially when you look backwards long enough to account for the time scales over which energy buildouts occur. Renewables have grown to 40% of the overall supply, resulting in the most expensive plants (currently coal plants, and before that peat) closing. Solar is entering the market rapidly though, it grew from like 1% to 4% in the last 3 years. So I wouldn’t be surprised to see some gas plants closing in the next few years, given the more expensive options are now already gone

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

#307

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…

You always need some backup when the wind does not blow, although in Ireland it blows almost everyday. A deal with the UK (although Milliband has idiotically jumped way too far on the green bandwagon and prevented North Sea drilling) should guarantee that.

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

#308
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pumped storage hydro is extremely cheap and efficient and has been around for more than a century. LiFePo4 batteries are now cheap enough that they're a cost-competitive alternative. Flywheel storage plugs the inertia gap nicely. The tech exists - it's mostly just a matter of political will. The economics already justify it. People are making considerable money by starting up BESSs (Battery Energy Storage Systems) an…

Cheap as in "requires proper location and the destruction of ecology on large scale" cheap? Edit : https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/features/energy-storage-ana... To cover Europe's need you only need to build 70 1.5 GW hydroelectric stations at a cost of $92 billion (in reality much higher) while greatly damaging ecology in large areas. (The link has rather detailed info)

This source also offers an option of $1 Trillion USD to do it with battery storage.

All of Europe. $1 Trillion USD. Oh, and that figure has already fallen by 1/3rd in reality and the article claims it should drop by half again.

And that seems to be assuming you only have wind power as input. The long lull periods that drive the high storage requirements are, as that article claims, caused by large high pressure air masses. High pressure systems like that often come with clear skies! Indeed, go look at weather history for that same 2015 period and you see that the skies were calm and clear, and precipitation was about half the "normal" amount for that time of year. While there is perfect correlation between a windless day and a night without sunlight, battery to get you through the night is trivial and solved far more cheaply than this article seems to understand. Enough battery to maintain 24 hour output for a solar farm is cheap enough to compete with fossil fuels. Long term, wind and solar do not correlate, so it's very rare to have long lulls in both at the same time.

So this article is leaving out important details and also is way more pessimistic than even it admits is true.

That also ignores that even in the "lulls", wind never seems to go to zero, so even in lulls, you can always just have more wind. Building 10x as much wind as you need is not as feasible as building 10x as much solar as you need though IMO.

Oh, and a very very very important fact: Renewable generation is almost entirely a one time cost, or one time every 30ish years on average. OPEX per kilowatt hour is dramatically lower than fossil fuels. In fact, today Europe imports 10 million barrels of crude oil a day, and at $100 a barrel (a number which will rise quite a bit in the coming months), Europe spends $1 Trillion every few years.

Europe's current energy spend is to buy an entire continent's worth of energy storage and just turn it into CO2 every few years. Every single day of crude oil import, Europe could instead pay for one of the Coire Glas model plants this article is doing the math with.

Storage is beyond feasible and will reduce energy costs.

Note: This article is about making wind energy constant over month long time scales, not about building enough storage to power Europe durably, so that explains some of it's misses, but also doesn't really explain much. The 2.1 TWh of storage it suggest would be enough to power all of Europe for 8 hours a day.

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

#309
post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did not expect HN to become this geopolitical. And are you sure about your claim? Every time I hear anything about China and Solar the core of it is that solar in China is growing more than anywhere else on the planet ( 40% increase in 2025 and creating ~11% of China's energy already ) And that there is no sign of that trend slowing down anytime soon. And why would it. Solar panels are dirt cheap and they have more…

They also are building more coal, gas, and nuclear than anyone else at epic yearly increases. 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 go…

They’re building more dirty plants than anyone, but they’re STILL making their mix cleaner at an impressive clip. Over 80% of new electric demand growth was met by renewables in 2024.

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

#310
post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ke…

> The actual causes of electricity cost rises in Ireland being higher than Europe are Wrong comparison. Most of Europe has way too high electricity prices. It seems logical that ending the use of existing coal energy infrastructure puts upward pressure on prices. Coal is cheap, abundant, energy dense. Yes, burning coal causes lots of problems and I support ending it's use, but this is besides the point.

> Coal is cheap, abundant, energy dense.

Nuclear defeats coal in all of these aspects, aside from the high upfront cost.

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