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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)

#451

Post by Dannymetconan »

lostlogin wrote: post #371
Dannymetconan wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Would any free market proponent like to chime in here? Why hasn’t this occurred?

It's actually fine in theory but it's nearly impossible to build anything in Ireland due to the way the planning laws work.

In an ideal situation we would be seeing a ramp up in production of all types to take advantage of the costs.

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

#452

Post by ianburrell »

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.

Coal was abundant. British coal was mined out. The coal that is left isn’t economical to mine.

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

#453

Post by DamonHD »

cogman10 wrote: post #53
DamonHD wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People heating their homes can be very sigificant. In the UK ~15% of all its territorial GHGs come from heating with gas: actual CO2 from the home boiler flues. CO2 from small amounts of rural home heating is probably not the big thing to be worried about, especially if local recent biomass, eg wood from forest management. But there are still nasties (PMs, biodiversity losses, etc) to be considered and that should be…

At least in 2004 (not sure if it's still the case) there are some homes which still burned coal for heat. That is the nastiest smell out there.

In England it is no longer legal to sell "traditional house" coal for domestic heating:

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/selling-coal-for-domestic-use-in...

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

#454

Post by Supernaut »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #354
saltysalt wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually it should help with both, because a on-island terminal would also provide LNG storage capacity which would buffer short-term price fluctuations. We have zero such storage. Again, our poor decision making around national infrastructure is on our governments. They left have left us completely exposed to international markets.

A lot of it relates to the planning process, they do keep trying to build things. One could argue that this is also their fault (and I do!) but there are good historical reasons (cough ray burke cough michael lowry) why we've ended up with such a bureaucratic, byzantine planning process.

Yes, there are many problems with the planning process, but as you conceded in another comment, the actual reason that we don't have an LNG terminal is that Eamonn Ryan nixed the possibility.

As usual with the Greens, perfection was the enemy of the good.

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

#455

Post by moominpapa »

Nemo_bis wrote: post #443
moominpapa wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At 1.6% per year, how long until China closes its last power station do you think?

'How did you go bankrupt?' Bill asked. 'Two ways,' the coal baron said. 'Gradually and then suddenly.'

Good luck with that strategy. Might have worked for suicidal Western Europe, but a snowball's chance for China.

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

#456

Post by tonfa »

eloisant wrote: post #441
pocksuppet wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's due to tax it can't be used to advocate the pros or cons of market arrangements, since we don't know what the market would be doing in the absence of the tax.

It's because of the rules of the European Energy Market where all electricity has to be as expensive as the most expensive source. So as soon as Germany lights up their gas powerplants, that follow gas prices (wars, etc), French nuclear electricity has to be sold for the same price.

> rules of the European Energy Market where all electricity has to be as expensive as the most expensive source.

aren't all/most electricity market working this way (pricing based on marginal price, aka pay-as-clear)?

pay-as-bid has other potential issues and might not be better.

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

#457

Post by bryanlarsen »

linksnapzz wrote: post #426
baron816 wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you're going to make that comparison, you need to compare apples-to-apples and include solar efficiency in the coal too. After all coal's energy originally came from the sun. Plants converted the sunlight into energy at an efficiency of about 1%. A miniscule fraction of that energy went into the plant growth, and then a miniscule fraction of that energy was captured when the plant was converted into coal.

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

#458

Post by Dannymetconan »

pembrook wrote: post #398
Dannymetconan wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

| 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…

Real estate and energy prices are both two sides of the same coin and included in the cost of living...if you aren't aware? Also, both of these problems are caused by the same thing: NIMBY-ism. Modern western governments generally hate people new building new things. Whether its a renewable energy project, a fossil fuel plant, a housing development, etc. It's all the same problem.

They are the same side of the coin but one has a much larger effect then the other depending on where your are. Energy has always been expensive in Ireland and home insulation poor (though there have been lots of grants)

| NIMBY-ism.

True but it effects are much worse due to poor planning laws

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

#459

Post by bell-cot »

runarberg wrote: post #434
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…

Iceland (never used coal to my knowledge) is missing from the list.

Iceland's situation - tiny population, geothermal paradise - may be difficult for 99% of the world's countries to replicate.

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

#460

Post by ianburrell »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #258
ceejayoz wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You are also forgetting that Sun can be blocked during times of rains and Wind is unpredictable as well. We already have wires that cross continents to smooth out supply variations. It's exceedingly rare you get no sun and no wind over entire continents for an extended period. > You are forgetting that markets operate after work and the late night culture and so many other things. I'm not forgetting it, they just u…

> We already have wires that cross continents to smooth out supply variations. It's exceedingly rare you get no sun and no wind over entire continents for an extended period. I can be wrong but you would probably lose tons of efficiency even within High Voltage DC lines if everyday late night we take energy from different countries. Also this is getting outside of topic of discussion for me because one of the reasons…

HVDC is more efficient than you think, 3.5% losses per 1000km. Which means intracontinental is obviously good, and intercontinental will work in some situations.

Nuclear power is expensive, enough that “what about night” is solve by building extra solar and batteries. Also, renewables wreck the economics of base load power that needs to run all the time to pay back loan, but can’t compete with solar during the day.

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