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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)

#681

Dont worry China's opened up more than enough to cover Ireland's loss

That's the low quality comments that ruin everything. China connected 4 solar panels per SECOND last year. China is also has 265x the population and has growing energy demands. They build much less coal than they phase out. All you can muster is a "But uh china is doing something so you are irrelevant" which is neither helpful nor correct. You are supporting the status quo and support not changing a damn thing.

China has not had a 3rd party verified emission report published in over 3 years. You can only go based on their word and very low quality articles reporting all this success. Every year I hear their emission are peaking and every time the emission report comes out it turns out they've increased. People say "oh China reduced emissions by 1% this year" but it turns out they only reduced the rate of emission growth by 1%. So I'll believe they are reducing emissions when I see it.

Also its fair to bring them up, they are responsible for 36% of the worlds pollution and hold the lowest environmental standards in the 1st world. Without them working to combat this issue its pointless for anyone else to try.

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

#682
post #632

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Decommissioning costs" are essentially bad math. Here's this again: https://www.ourworldofenergy.com/images/electrical-power-gen... Nuclear, inclusive of construction costs: ~$181/MWh, only better than natural gas because no CO2. Nuclear, cost of continuing to operate an existing reactor once it's already built: $31/MWh, basically the cheapest thing on the market, half the cost of continuing to operate an existing n…

>Decommissioning costs" are essentially bad math. This is disingenuous. Bad math is focusing on the one part of nuclear power which is relatively cheap (fuel) and ignoring the rest where the majority of the cost is, which is what you did. I wasnt comparing nuclear power to gas anyway I was comparing it to solar and wind which produce no CO2. FIVE times cheaper LCOE. Nuclear power needs anyway to be paired with dispat…

> Bad math is focusing on the one part of nuclear power which is relatively cheap (fuel) and ignoring the rest where the majority of the cost is, which is what you did.

The majority of the cost is construction, which is expensive when you're trying to amortize the costs of a plant design over only one or two plants instead of a hundred, which is what I said.

> FIVE times cheaper LCOE.

Five times cheaper as long as you want the most output when the market price is the lowest and the least output when it's the highest. And "five times" is with existing subsidies.

> Nuclear power needs anyway to be paired with dispatchable energy source like batteries or gas just as solar and wind do.

Nuclear power is baseload. All three of those do different things.

Suppose you have 10 GW of minimum load (e.g. late evening to sunrise) and 20 GW of peak load (e.g. late afternoon to early evening). Then nuclear is good for the former and solar+storage is good for the difference between the former and the latter.

To begin with, solar output actually partially aligns with the latter. Load is higher during the day. It's also high just after sunset, but that's only for a couple hours, and then you don't need a lot of batteries to cover it, which you can charge with more solar. But you'd need a lot more batteries (or gas plants) to make it through the whole night. That kind of sucks if load looks like it currently does, and it really sucks if you want people to switch from fossil fuels to electric heat, because then the highest load is going to be in the hours of darkness on the days with the least sunlight.

Meanwhile it's not just a problem that there is no solar output when it's dark. Sometimes renewable output is low for an extended period of time. It could be at 20% of typical for a month. Having enough batteries to last a month rather than just overnight is prohibitively expensive. So instead you'd have to build five times as much generation, which is only the same cost as nuclear because of government subsidies (which would require a much larger government budget allocation if you tried to build that much of them), and only if you're using the recent high price of nuclear that comes from building very few plants instead the lower prices that would be possible by doing it at scale.

And even using the subsidized price for renewables against the current price for nuclear, if you actually tried to build five times the capacity in renewables, the "generates the most when the market price is the lowest" thing would destroy you. The price on most days would then be zero because of huge oversupply and you'd have to recover the same total cost as current nuclear from only the days when your output is lowest.

Meanwhile if you use nuclear for what it is, i.e. baseload, and build only as much of it as you have minimum load throughout the day, it not only doesn't require any storage, it avoids the need for solar to use storage to supply power at night. Then you use solar for the incremental load during the day, to charge the batteries to use for the incremental load in the early evening and for charging electric vehicles by putting chargers in workplaces.

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

#683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>It has killed many, many more than the world’s nuclear accidents.

For that matter, it has killed many, many more than the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan!

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

#684
post #616
post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes with the next sentence explaining why, and how future years are planned to decrease. "Ramping up" means planned to increase. Feel free to provide a reference that supports that it's "ramping up". I, and parent, couldn't find one. This is a super boring factual thing that I was curious about, where opinion has no place or purpose.

> "Ramping up" means planned to increase. No it doesn't. It means increasing.

[deleted]

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

#685
post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might be one of those situations where globally it is irrelevant but heavily fouls up local air due to geography or prevailing airflow patterns.

Smoke yes, but you're also turning a carbon sink into a carbon source. At ~16% of the island's surface area, peatland stores an estimated 53% of soil based carbon. (source: Irish Peatland Conservation Council)

It grows back right?

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

#686

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What have you assumed was my original position and why is that relevant when my next rhetorical question was a follow up to being asked if I had any other questions? This is getting tedious now. The basic facts are China has something like 1200 coal powered stations and is still building more. I would not congratulate myself just because my cigarette to beer ratio was dropping if only because I was drinking alot more…

> What have you assumed was my original position I have not assumed anything. I read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47311879 , which is your comment, with the first rhetorical question. Your implied claim is that China is not shifting away from coal. In point of fact, they are. You repeatedly conflate two different things. > This is getting tedious now. Agreed. But you were the one using an obnoxious rhetorical…

The only conflation is coming from you - the first question was not rhetorical, the second was, hence the link sent with it. If asking questions is obnoxious, I suggest you get out more. I am finished explaining.

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

#687
post #676

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

We've banned this account for continually posting comments like this that are unsubstantive and clearly in breach of the guidelines and HN's intended use.

[dead]

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

#688
post #536
post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trump had a few executive orders that derailed phase out plans and the DoE released a coal plant refurbishing subsidy[1]. 1. https://www.energy.gov/articles/energy-department-announces-...

So, in both cases it's helping sustain. "Ramping up" means increasing . Is there something I'm missing here?

I consider minimizing a natural decline with artificial subsidies as ramping up - maybe a fairer phrase would be "dragging out production" but either way the administration is putting a thumb on their scale to counter natural market forces to perpetuate a dumb thing.

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

#689
post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the exclusion zone is political nonsense. And overall coal has made much more areas much worse to live in. I rather live in the exclusion zone then next many coal plants. Also there is a single case that happened from a non-western design. When looking at western countries like France, it shows how incredibly safe the whole industry is end to end.

Chernobyl's political nonsense was mostly down to the USSR wanting to deny that anything had, or possibly could, go wrong; if anything, the exclusion zone is the opposite of the western nonsense about nuclear power. It's our unique freedom-themed nonsense, not the Soviet dictatorial-nonsense, which means we have radiation standards strict enough that it's not possible to convert a coal plant into a nuclear plant with…

Nuclear plans have objectively made power generation save and clean. When they were built in the 1960-1990s the were objectively the best and cleanest energy that saved a gigantic amount of lives.

The exclusion zone is nonsense because many that live in that zone has lower cancer rates then those outside. The idea is based on a invalid assumption about radiation an a linear relationship between radiation and harm. An I do think the standards we apply are to extreme in many cases mostly dating back to this misunderstanding about radiation.

As for the locality to nuclear plants and cancer, this is as far as I know been shown in many countries and as far as I know at least can mostly be explained by nuclear plants usually being built in industrial areas that often used to have coal plants and other industry going on.

> nuclear reactors are there for the spicy atoms, not the price tag or public safety.

Not sure what 'spicy' means in this context. In terms of price tag they are objectively a fantastic deal if built in larger numbers. Even in places where they were not built in the numbers they did in France, they are good life time deal, and give relativity stable long term prices.

And they don't have to be 'there' for public safety, they just need a good record on public safety and they do.

In places like Austria and Germany we have many known cases where a nuclear plant was planned and was prevented by activists, only to be replaced by coal, in both cases impacting 10000s of lives being worse financially in the long term.

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

#690

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, you can call it a "mountain" of greenwashing but to me it looks more like a mole hill. Total Swedish electricity production is typically 160 to 165 TWh per year and total consumption is usually between 135 and 145 TWh. In 2025, the net export was about 33 TWh. Gross import from Germany, Poland and Lithuania, including transit to other countries, was 1 TWh. So, imported power from countries with coal power pla…

I think it's huge greenwashing to claim to not have coal power, but just import it when needed. What practical difference is that to having coal power domestically? That's just saying you recycle all plastic, only to send it to the third world to dump in rivers. So I think it's untrue to say that Sweden doesn't rely on coal power. Without coal power it'd have regular blackouts. I rely on being able to take a breath e…

> So I think it's untrue to say that Sweden doesn't rely on coal power. Without coal power it'd have regular blackouts.

The european grid is interconnected so it's basically all fungible. But it's not the case that there would be blackouts, since the price mechanism is used to match production, demand and return on production investments. So policy decisions to ramp down fossil generation result in investment decisions to new non fossil generation capacity.

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