Ireland shuts last coal plant, becomes 15th coal-free country in Europe (2025) (opens in new tab)

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.

How is it "Moldova's" then

I may be wrong, but I believe the british experience with biofuels is that although you want to believe its surplus byproduct, the cheapest source is often grown to be fuel for a biofuel generator. It's like soy/corn for ethanol, it isn't sufficiently profitable to do this solely with waste product, you get better margins growing to fulfill the contract.

> For most practical purposes, Swedish electricity generation has been basically fossile free since the 1980's.

I think "practical purposes" should include the fact that thanks to also shutting down a bunch of nuclear, Sweden regularly imports German/Polish coal power.

Sweden claiming fossile free is only technically true. Practically there's a mountain of greenwashing.

So no, I would not say what you just said. I find that greenwashing dishonest.

By being anti nuclear, the green parties around the world have caused more radiation[1] and climate changing co2 than any other movement in history.

[1] An oft cited statistic is that coal causes more deaths every single year from radiation (excluding accidents) than nuclear has has caused in its entire history INCLUDING accidents.

This is true. A nuance often missed. Different rock (that is considerably worse in several ways, needs heavy fuel oil to be added to actually burn and has I think even higher co2 output per unit of energy) but kinda the same.

I agree that the wording is a little misleading. "No coal ever in the electricity mix" is what's stated on the site.

It seems they consider only coal use in the 21st century in mainland Europe + UK (i.e. not Greenland, Iceland, Svalbard, etc.).

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

Yes it’s good, but it’s bad that conservative parties still blocking modernization of the power grid/renewables.

It would be good if we could modernize our grid to support easier exchange of power from north to south and vise versa.

Was it the environmentalists or the corrupt German government wanting to send more money to Russia for their natural gas via nordstream2

> Well, sure is good the environmentalists shut down the German nuclear plants!

Shutting down the nukes is inversely proportional to homeopathy popularity in Germany. That says it all

It's not true of course. Correct would be to say it perhaps never produced power by coal.

But It bought a lot and most of it had come from coal generation.

I know at least Sweden has been a net exporter for a long time. It's a little bit complicated (that's what happens in a market economy). Anyhow, we/EU should continue to strive to end coal as an energy source for all countries, be since we can do much better.

This is a strange claim. During its peak years - in the mid 1990s - Moneypoint (the only coal plant in the country) provided 25% or more of the electricity mix while wind generation consisted of a few tiny pilot plants - contributing a miniscule.

In 2026, coal now provides 0% of the mix while wind provides 30% or more. Peat burning has also been fully phased out while oil (Tarbert) is in the process of being shut down while Moneypoint has been converted to oil but only participates in the capacity market - i.e. as an emergency/backup source - and so barely registers in the mix.

And even if coal was supplanted one-for-one with NG, it would still be a net win - by halving the CO2 intensity of generation as well as being far more flexible, scalable and much cheaper to deploy.

I’m not an expert here, but my understanding is that coal-free steel production is not a solved problem yet. And no, importing Chinese steel and moving the problem elsewhere isn’t a reason to pat yourself on the back.

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.

Gas is kinda easier to replace though. As you can burn other Gases instead of Natural Gases with a few modifications to the Powerplant.

China's CO2 emissions have been falling for the last 2 years, even as they've increased their manufacturing capacity.

https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...

It should also be mentioned that despite being the factory of the world, China's CO2 emissions per capita are nearly half of the United States and comparable to some European countries.

Export is only a small part of their emissions.

Thank you for the link.

I understand China has about twice the inhabitant of USA+EU but the same consumption based CO2, am I wrong?

The issue is very complex. First - broad generalization - Europe's surviving industry is mostly made of less critical industries. If you look at important things in the world, and the important things that make up or make those important things, a tiny fraction of that is European, and that fraction is shrinking rapidly. There are some things - there is some green manufacturing stuff going on, there is some high-precision stuff in IT/CH/DE, there is ASML and Airbus, Poland can actually make things, etc. - but where will that be in ten or twenty years? I'll tell you: the high-precision stuff is rapidly moving to Asia, the green manufacturing is not very cost effective and uses a lot of imported core technologies, the C919 is going to fly with Chinese engines soon... the list goes on. The EU badly wants to make solar panels, cutting edge chips, fighter jets, rockets et cetera - and it simply can't, not at the cutting edge. The US, on the other hand, can make all of those things. It is still behind China in manufacturing overall, but it can still make a lot of the cutting edge, and it is still innovating.

Second, a lot of the EU stuff is already dead and only continues to exist through inertia. The median German cars and machine tools are worse than the median Chinese and they cost far more.

Third, those numbers often reflect the nebulous concept of "value added." Let's take the case of a refrigerator. Chinese company manufactures every technical part of the refrigerator and ships it to their EU business partner for €100. EU partner assembles it, fills it with foam, and sells it for €600. Most of the "value added" was in the EU! Win for the EU! Go EU manufacturing! The concept of "value added" is the basis for the entire EU VAT system and much of its economic indicators and incentives, while in the US it is almost never mentioned. This is also the source of the most hilarious comparisons (Greek manufacturing superior to the US per capita? χαχαχα)

If you want to cut through the bullshit, you have to look at actual things made. Among the US/CN/EU, who leads: Solar panels (CN), cutting edge chips (US), chipmaking equipment (EU), jet engines (US), aircraft (US), space launch vehicles (US), fighter jets (US), batteries (CN), nuclear reactors (CN), submarines (US), advanced missiles (US), cars (CN), CNC machines (CN), machine tools (CN), precision bearings and linear motion systems (CN), cutting edge medical equipment (US), gas turbines (US/EU), high voltage grid equipment (CN), telecom equipment (CN), construction equipment (US), ships (CN), advanced optics (EU), electric motors (CN), steel (CN), aluminum (CN), oil (US), cutting edge pharma (US), industrial robots (CN), wind turbines (CN), trains (CN), agricultural machinery (US/EU), drones (CN), smartphones (CN.) From that list, China leads eighteen, the US leads eleven, the EU leads two, and the EU and US are tied for two. And China is closing in fast on chipmaking. When China takes that crown, what will the EU have left?

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.

Also the fact that it greatly lessens energy dependence should not be understated.

Overall Result (Typical Modern Coal Plant)

When multiple systems are combined the percentage of things filtered out is:

Pollutant Typical removal Dust / particulate matter 99–99.9%+ Sulfur dioxide (SO₂) 90–98% Nitrogen oxides (NOx) 70–90% Mercury 80–95%

It's even more nuanced than that because the United States is made up of many different states, with many different energy policies. Ireland would most closely equate to the state of Massachusetts by population and economic size, and Massachusetts shut down its last coal plant almost a decade ago.

I don't know if I buy this argument. If the US sends oil to another country, which burns it for energy, produces a finished good and exports that back to the US, then the CO2 released isn't accounted for in production-based numbers. But it seems to me like it isn't really properly accounted for in the consumption-based numbers that Noah is holding up, because those are effectively giving the US a credit for exporting the oil in the first place that offsets the imported good. As he says, the US's exports are carbon-intensive and that largely explains the difference being so small.

Noah also tries to refute the perception that manufacturing is in decline in the US, but he doesn't adjust per-capita and doesn't account for the obvious fact that major US exports are looking more and more like raw materials and less like finished goods, while imports are the other way around. Aircraft and ICs used to compete for top spot on the US export list. Since 2008 it's petroleum and oil.

What is the point of comparing the US to Ireland? Perhaps compare it to something like the state of Oklahoma.

Coal is so deeply irrational. Only when you plug your ears and scream can you block out comprehension of the massive local externalities that make it inefficient compared to other energy options. It is cheap to setup with minimal access to highly skilled professionals so it was a good option to bootstrap economies until recently when solar, wind and NG have become easy to access and cost competitive. It's perfectly reasonable to have a phase out timeline to avoid under utilizing paid-for infrastructure, but it is a dead technology.

Steel is also a small percentage of coal use. The vast majority of coal is used for electricity generation.

> europes coal powerplants are in china, its polution is in china, the products of china are in europe and the producers from china live in europe and the us.

This is generally overstated. Emissions imported or exported via trade are significantly smaller than domestic emissions for almost every country. In the EU vs China case, accounting for imported/exported emissions basically changes which of the two is doing better, but emission levels are pretty close to begin with (US is already doing significantly worse than China either way).

For China, we are talking about ~1 ton/person/year from trade (in favor of China), while local emissions are at ~8 tons/person/year [1].

You make a valid point, but looking at the actual numbers it turns out that this makes (surprisingly) little difference.

[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/imported-or-exported-co-e...

True, I was referring to domestic heat in rural areas.

Your username made me chuckle!

And Germany of all places mines huge amounts of brown coal, which is only barely not peat.

It's the best-smelling fire.

damn right

> If you use Renewable Energy Sources, it may happen there will be no wind or no sun

I still find it staggering that people feel like this is something that needs to be said as if it’s surprising or a novel idea. Do you really believe smart people haven’t been working through these challenges for decades?

> If you use Renewable Energy Sources, it may happen there will be no wind or no sun

If you have to import fuel, it may happen that no ships can get through. Or the fuel becomes too expensive to buy because of war, natural disasters, or market forces. Ain't nobody turning off the sun or wind.

> Maybe, when we have technology to store efficiently electricity at scale

Actually we have it now.

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) and doing time arbitrage on energy.

cf. Iberia, who recently learned that effective storage and intertial pick-up is integral to a stable and efficient power network, and are now spending heavily on both.

> If you use Renewable Energy Sources, it may happen there will be no wind or no sun.

Yes, but this rarely happens, so any potential solution should be designed around it being idle 99% of the time.

> Those power plants have about 1h cold start.

Gas turbines can spin up significantly faster. However, the weather is quite predictable, so it is unlikely that this will be needed. Besides, battery storage is the perfect solution as an ultra-fast ramp-up holdover source until the turbines are at 100%.

> Hence, in order to have RES you need to emit CO2.

Or you equip the handful of gas turbines you use to make up for that 1% gap in renewables with carbon capture? It's not ideal, but it is very much doable.

> Simply use nuclear power plants and do not bother with RES

... and have your electricity be even more expensive?

> this must be something with fast cold start. So black/brown coal power plan will not help you, similarly nuclear.

Nuclear plants provide base load and they are extremely fast at ramping up/lowering production. All modern nuclear plants are capable of changing power output at 3-5% of nameplate capacity per minute: https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2021-12...

You don't shut down power plants. None of the power plants ever do a "fast cold start"

> The end result now is that electricity in Europe is the most expensive on the World, so all manufacturing is moved to Asia

The production moved to Asia due to extremely cheap labor, not due to electricity costs.

> 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 Israel can build an electrical grid connection to Greece then Ireland should have no problem building good connections with France and the UK.

The argument that Ireland’s high costs are primarily due to low population density is a common oversimplification. While Ireland is rural, countries like Finland and Sweden have significantly lower population densities and more challenging geography, yet they consistently maintain lower residential and industrial electricity prices. The issue isn't where the people live. It's the gold-plating of the network. Ireland’s regulatory framework allows EirGrid and ESB Networks to pass massive capital expenditure costs directly to the consumer with guaranteed returns, leading to a build-at-any-cost mentality that density doesn't justify.

The claim of "previous underinvestment" ignores the massive capital outlays of the last decade. Ireland has actually seen massive investment in its grid to accommodate renewables, but the efficiency of that spend is questionable. We have a "constraint payment" system where we pay wind farms not to produce power when the grid is congested. In 2023 alone, these payments reached hundreds of millions of euros. This isn't "underinvestment". It's an operational failure to align generation with grid capacity, a cost that is hidden in the consumer's bill.

You suggest that "saving the world harder" (more renewables) would have lowered prices. This ignores the Marginal Pricing Model. In the Single Electricity Market (SEM), the price of electricity is set by the most expensive generator needed to meet demand - which is almost always a gas-fired plant. Therefore, even if wind provides 80% of the power at a given moment, consumers often still pay the "gas price" for all of it. Adding more renewables without reforming the marginal price auction system does nothing to lower the immediate cost to the consumer. It just increases the profit margins for renewable operators.

I should also comment on the source of that report: Nevin Economic Research Institute (NERI). NERI is not a neutral academic body. It is the research arm of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU). NERI’s research is fundamentally rooted in Social Democratic and Labor-centric economics. Their reports consistently advocate for increased public spending and state intervention. By focusing on "underinvestment" and "network costs," NERI shifts the blame away from the policy failures of the green transition and toward a narrative that justifies more state-led infrastructure spending. They often downplay the impact of aggressive carbon taxing and the "Public Service Obligation" (PSO) levy, which are direct policy choices that have inflated Irish bills compared to the EU average.

Finally, the "poor connections to neighbors" argument is becoming obsolete. With the Greenlink and Celtic Interconnector (to France) coming online, Ireland is becoming one of the most strategically connected islands in Europe. If isolation were the primary driver, prices should be falling as these projects near completion. Instead, they remain the highest in the EU (often 40-50% above the average). The "island" excuse is a convenient shield for domestic policy inefficiencies.

Your link is from a disreputable source though. Their literal purpose is to gaslight people.

> 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 energy cheap. Relying on Oil and Gas leaves us hugely at the whims of the international markets.

It's grid capacity more than anything which is the issue, and (like many other Irish issues) this is downstream of failures in our planning and permitting process.

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.

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.

> Ireland is richer than it has ever been.

Isn't that more about big tech companies using Ireland as a tax dodge, rather than a sign of average people doing well?

For less-well-off people, energy costs in the UK are a huge issue, they're more than twice what they were pre-Covid. Energy bills are second only to housing costs when it comes to the cost of living crisis. Although grocery price inflation/shrinkflation has been pretty shocking too.

If this stuff is cheaper, why are prices going up?

„Ireland“ is rich because companies have their office there. „The Irish“ are not rich.

Talk about ill informed.

> 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 here because we refused to regulate spillovers up to EU standards, but that's less than half of the story.

tl;dr loads of golf courses, english speaking population, smart industrial plannng and tax dodging was really how it happened.

> This attitude is ill informed.

> Renewables are cheaper now than most forms of energy production. Grids need investment.

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

> I despair at these short sighted and fairly wrong on the facts views.

The level of arrogance is unmatched while being both factually wrong AND self-contradictory.

Absolute cinema!

Taiwan and perhaps other Asian countries that successfully make stuff don't expose their industries to this, the government sets a fixed energy price for them rather than leaving them at the whim of speculators.

You don't have to, but you make more profit if you do. An energy producer that has the choice to sell energy for a lower price domestically or a higher price internationally will obviously choose the higher price, but you can make laws to make that illegal, if you want to.

And even when we did mine coal, it was a small amount, and this plant never received any of it. It was designed from the start to run on imported coal, brought in on ships, and did not even have a rail connection.

Recent data on import depdency from a link someone posted:

> Ireland's energy import dependency was 79.6% in 2024, up from 78.3% in 2023 (for comparison, the EU average for 2023 was 58.3%).

> Ireland imported 100% of its oil, 79.5% of its gas, and 14.0% of its electricity in 2024.

Generation technology got cheap quickly, but the grid expansion needed to support it moves at a much slower pace

> very little coal

For practical purposes no coal. There are no working coal mines in Ireland, and Moneypoint would have run entirely on imported coal since it was built. It was built with a bulk handling terminal for this purpose (very visible in photos of the plant: https://esb.ie/news---insights/inside-esb/moneypoint-power-s...).

Note that it doesn't have a rail link; even if there had been the desire to use domestic coal and someone had gotten a mine going, there would have been no way to get it there.

You don’t have any coal fired power stations and only a little coal used for other purposes compared to historical uses.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-by-end-user-uk

Your emissions are dropping fast

https://ourworldindata.org/profile/co2/united-kingdom

It’s not box ticking it’s the complexity of change.

We only use coal for steel. It's tiny. Ships are very efficient and our mines leak more methane than Aus ones, so the emissions are actually lower.

> Here in England we now drag the coal over on smoke spewing ships from Japan and Australia, rather than mine it here

Australia I see but Japan? Japan is the world's third largest coal importer. I don't think they are sending much coal to England.

> Another Irishman here, completely agree with your comment. My domestic gas and electric bills have never been higher, insane inflation for nothing more than political virtue signalling.

The only part of your bills that could be regarded as virtue signalling is the carbon tax, which is driven by government regulation. The vast increases in energy costs were driven firstly by Russia (when they invaded Ukraine) and the US (when they attacked Iran).

And this hits me too, I have (unfortunately) oil heating which has gone from about 500 to 800 over the course of the last week. Fortunately we filled up last month, but it's really worrying.

Ultimately though, the only way to fix this is to build a lot of wind (industrial scale) and solar (residential scale) as otherwise we're at the mercy of world events.

Don't let the populist sentiment gain you, this has nothing to do with environmentalism. You want a scape-goat? Blame the decades of neoliberalism that led to such under-investments in our public infrastructure.

Energy ≠ electricity

Electricity generated from peat peaked at 19.5% in 1990, apparently.

And that's far outstripped by the current figure for renewables (42% in 2025) - so renewables have enabled locally-sourced production to reach more than double the share that was ever managed in the peat-burning days.

(And the comparison is actually even better than it seems at first glance, given that the 2025 figures are all-island and the peat figures would be 3 or 4 points lower if you included NI. A good chunk of the 23.2% imports can probably also be classed as renewable, given that GB had a 47% renewable mix)

This is just vague, incoherent angst dripping with so much sarcasm that it’s impossible for me to even understand what you’re trying to say.

Ireland hasn't mined coal at all for about 40 years and _never_ really mined any significant part of its usage; even in the 19th century Ireland imported coal. Moneypoint was designed from the start to run on imported coal; it had no rail link, and a bloody great bulk-handling port attached to it. Getting rid of Moneypoint actually increased energy security (we do produce _some_ of our own natural gas, and the renewables don't require imports).

It's a marker of low IQ populism to believe things are simple and that the elite/technocracy/whatever is trying to hide that truth from us while making sure to never research why that might be so that they can keep on playing the blame game.

No if you allow to exit the simplistic low/high IQ paradigm you set up, I just can't take seriously comments like this who have not even started to try to show that they have any grip on the subject at all. Heck you haven't even tried to assess the quantity/availability of Ireland's "own resource". Do you seriously want Ireland to relay on peat ? How long would that last ?

Hard to see past the scientific consensus on global warming

The real insanity is to keep burning that coal, that we know will render large part of the Earth uninhabitable if we don't stop ASAP. Also, it's more expensive than cleaner energy. You want a culprit so bad? Blame EU neoliberalism whose auterity has diverted important, necessary funds from our energy grid and left us in this delicate position.

Yes, China consumes a lot of coal. But they are trying to consume less. You cannot ask a developing country to go back on its merging into the first world by consuming less energy or investing in more expensive sources only. We westerners are here because we grew on cheap and dirty energy, what moral ground do we have to ask them to stop growing?

Coal was almost 100% of China energy consumption only 15 years ago, with a bit of hydro. Today they are very aggressively shifting towards anything but coal, as you found in ChatGPT, to less than 60% of coal in the mix. For comparison, the US is almost at the same point today than 15 years ago, only significantly replaced coal with more gas. A country that is consuming about the same amount of energy since 2000, while China consumes 5x.

Can't blame GPT I guess it wasn't trained that recently but China is now taking steps to rectify that.

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/china-...

Now ask it whether it produces more renewable energy than the rest of the world combined.

BREAKING NEWS: China is big.

Just to play Devil's advocate here, [approximately 600,000 people die each year from extreme heat, while 4.5 million die from extreme cold.](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5...) Let's ignore the ratio for now, because there are second and third order consequences beyond extreme heat like famine to account for. 4.5 million people die each year because of inadequate access to cheaper energy. This is of course linear. Every time energy prices go up, so too do the number of people dying. That is the direct cost of the war on oil, coal, and natural gas, and there are many indirect costs (and lives) which go far beyond this. The intention of climate activists is to make fossil fuels much more expensive, meaning many more deaths.

Of course, maybe the goal here is worth killing 4.5+++ million people per year. There are no perfect solutions; only compromises. Maybe many more will die if we don't act. [The IPCC estimates that an additional 250,000 people per year, between 2030 and 2050, will die from the effects of climate change.](https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/climate-cha...) That covers all modes of death, such as famine. For those in the room doing the math, many times more people will die today by making energy more expensive. Activists are asking us to sacrifice millions of lives per year today to save an estimated 250,000 lives per year decades from now.

For this reason, I no longer support making energy more expensive. I support environmental efforts to reduce pollution, but I can no longer justify the high cost of human life associated with taxes on energy. Instead, I really think activists should focus on making energy cheaper. This means working on solutions to make renewable energy and nuclear cheaper per unit of energy than fossil fuels. That's a path to saving lives which I think most people can get on board with.

No.

Our biggest interconnect is with France which is 72% nuclear. Currently importing 3GW from them.

Our second biggest is with Norway which is 88% hydroelectric. Currently importing 1.7GW from them.

We're importing 0.2GW from Belgium which is partly gas and partly nuclear.

We're exporting power to Ireland, The Netherlands and Denmark.

Imports is 6-7% of current UK grid power. Most of our power comes from us burning North Sea gas.

[1] https://grid.iamkate.com/

[2] https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/live/fifteen_minutes

https://grid.iamkate.com/

Reducing is frivolous today. We will break through the tipping point in 2030. This will be the coolest century this millennium. There's no way to stop it. We needed to shut down emissions years ago. The only thing we can do proactively is invest in moon-shot tech such as fusion and ocean wave generation and wait for the planet to recover.

> And here the question is: why would you want a single goal? Why 100% renewable?

Overlapping goals can coexist on varying time frames.

Setting aside nuclear (technically not "renewable", but also not carbon-based, and very energy dense) the goal is to stop releasing CO2 into the air from energy generation and return to pre-industrial levels.

This is because the surplus of CO2 generated so far has already caused clear and undeniable problems (not all of which are yet fully realized), and continued excess will only make things worse.

> What drives us should be: save where it makes sense, don't where it doesn't. Iterate every 10 years and recheck.

Solar is already economically competitive in many places and is expected to improve further.