501–510 of 712 posts
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'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.
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This. Fossil fuels are not cheap in Ireland, I think we only produce a small quantity of natural gas, everything else is imported. Ireland should be running towards renewables, we have no indigenous fossil fuels industry to lose and every watt we generate from renewables is money that stays in Ireland. We should be focused on reducing nimbyism and building out renewables.
How close are Ireland to 100% wind during optimal weather?
https://www.eirgrid.ie/news/new-record-wind-energy-all-islan...
For actual generation over a longer time period, in February 2026, 48% of energy used was generated from renewable sources, of which the vast majority (41% of energy use) was wind:
https://www.eirgrid.ie/news/almost-50-electricity-came-renew...
(The previous February was slightly better with 54% renewable and 48% wind)
https://www.eirgrid.ie/news/renewables-powered-over-half-ele...
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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.
So The "worst case scenario" for nuclear power is creating a new wildlife park free from human interference [and emptying out half of Los Angeles]
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> I'd add that this is only part of the equation because: what do you do on an overcast day with no wind? Battery technology is really, really getting there. And in the absence of any more improvements here (unlikely) you integrate your grids with other countries. That's harder for Ireland, but it's still worth doing.
Does this battery technology grow on trees in Ireland, or does it exist in a foreign (and perhaps one day adversial) nation, like China? The sheer number of people in this thread saying, "we need renewables to be independent!", from countries that don't actually manufacture anything, is astonishing.
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"Cloudy days are solved by wind, ocean energy, geothermal, storage," Or, as Homer Simpson famously put it..."I dunno; Internet?" But seriously, there's no significant recycling of solar panels, coal extraction is a known process, and good luck running an industrial economy exclusively on renewables.
> storage There’s the direct answer to your question, cost of installed grid battery storage are getting cheaper by the user and it’s completely viable option at present. It’s not some vague fantasy idea like power plants in space or something, just look at California’s energy mix during peaks that in just a few years has become dominated by solar+batteries. For longer periods of low-sun in a climate like Ireland see…
Places like California, which is right up there w/ Tunisia as the best-case scenario for solar, will have so much surplus electricity that USX and Tata are rushing to build steel mills there to take advantage.
Any day now, for sure.
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…
This is now how we should be looking at the problem. It doesn't matter if you burn coal yourself or not. What matters is the source of your energy. Every single one of those countries imports energy from other markets which consume fossil fuels for production.
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Ireland isn't sunny enough for solar to help with AGW. In fact, solar in Ireland actually just frontloads and exports to the 3rd world the CO2 generated. Oh, and the power to make PV panels...comes from coal. On the other hand, if you just put a windmill next to an Irish politician, you could power the entire country.
That would only be true if solar panels had be trashed and repurchased every 6 months. But instead they last > 25 years, and can be recycled rather than trashed.
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> 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…
None of those things were possible without the fossil fuel based energy underlying everything. Every single wealthy country used energy from fossil fuels to escape poverty. Some to a greater degree than others but that’s the basic reality. Now we have a way out of fossil fuels and we must take it or things will get even worse than they are already going to get anyway. And I did say it was only part of the story, albe…
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Carbon taxes are huge, and they are 100% politically imposed. And they're often disingenously included in fossil fuel pricing to claim that green energy is fundamentally cheaper. I believe in climate change, and I believe in doing something about it. But being disingenous with the public is only going to create resentment and resistance to Net Zero.
> And they're often disingenously included in fossil fuel pricing to claim that green energy is fundamentally cheaper. There’s nothing unreasonable about this: fossil fuels have huge costs associated with them that are invisible to the consumer. They’ve just been getting pushed off onto other people forever.
But don't expect me to take you seriously when you directly compare a raw price of renewable energy with an uplifted price of fossil fuels.
Especially when your quoted price for renewable energy ignores the cost of grid upgrades, storage infrastructure, and externalities associated with mining materials to manufactur solar panels and wind turbines etc (as happened recently in UK parliament when the energy minister did a very dubious comparison between energy prices)
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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.
"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…
These are what makes it cost 5x solar or wind.