571–580 of 712 posts
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They are replacing old dirty plants. Actual coal burned is not rising anymore.
So they are building new coal plants.
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.
>No country will be truly coal-free Being coal-free is possible. Being fossil-fuel free is harder. Most of Irish energy comes from Natural Gas and Oil - the former is what supplanted Coal, not Wind.
There is absolutely no good reason to burn coal for electricity or heat in this day and age. If we had sane global leadership, every coal power plant left would be treated as a WMD and be bombed harder than that Iranian fuel depot.
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Air quality will improve, just not CO2
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.
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Not cost competitive with solar+batteries in many locales (less so the closer to the poles), and no learning curve, if anything a negative learning curve, nuclear never was more expensive than new nuclear. And off course societal (and geopolitical) acceptance issues.
>And off course societal (and geopolitical) acceptance issues. Right. One thing I've rarely heard emphasized is that, while nuclear power is not at all the same as nuclear weapons, it's still infrastructure that can be repurposed from one to the other. A world where nuclear is the predominant base load power source is a world where nuclear weapons are more accessible due to the proliferation of sibling technologies.
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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 also are building more coal, gas, and nuclear than anyone else at epic yearly increases. Are they really? Coal use for power generation stopped growing, so newly built coal plants are replacing older, not adding to them. Nuclear while still being built does not seem to be accelerating anymore.
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I think the domestic heating use is a drop in the bucket compared to commercial extraction of peat for export, or historical use for electricity generation. I've only so many shits to give, and people heating their homes doesn't rank.
On cold mornings you can see the wood smoke hanging over the town of Taos New Mexico. It's easy to see even a little bit of haze in the otherwise crystal clear air. Taos is in general a very environmentally conscious place. The KTAO radio station has been solar powered since the early 1990s. It also has a significant population of low wage tourism industry workers.
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…
Moldova's coal plant is in Transnistria, a territory occupied by Russia. There are no phasing out plans because we have no control over it.
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> Nuclear plants provide base load and they are extremely fast at ramping up/lowering production The obvious counterexample is Chernobyl, where a big contributor was the fact that they were unable to scale it down & back up as desired. Yes, nuclear reactors can scale down rapidly - but you have to wait several hours until it can scale back up! Besides, the linked paper only covers load-following in a traditional grid…
The answer is you don't scale nuclear up or down, it's a silly waste of time and effort to even think about it. The fuel costs are effectively a rounding error, so running at 100% 24x7 is the only way to ever think about how nuclear should operate. If you are going to curtail, you curtail other sources including solar and wind. Nuclear fits quite well for the baseload you need. It's more expensive, but if you are goi…
Your argument only works in entirely state controlled systems, not in free energy markets of independent suppliers. Which is why nukes don’t get built.
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Moldova's coal plant is in Transnistria, a territory occupied by Russia. There are no phasing out plans because we have no control over it.
You could disconnect from it. That's much easier said than done and probably very complicated by the occupation, but I would guess that disconnecting would reduce coal consumption and greenhouse gas emissions proportionally to power usage.