Never used coal power:
Albania, Cyprus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Switzerland, Norway
Phased out: 2016: Belgium
2020: Sweden, Austria
2021: Portugal
2024: United Kingdom
2025: Ireland
Phase-out planned: 2026: Slovakia, Greece
2027: France
2028: Italy, Denmark
2029: The Netherlands, Hungary, Finland
2030: Spain, North Macedonia
2032: Romania
2033: Slovenia, Czechia, Croatia
2035: Ukraine
2038: Germany
2040: Bulgaria
2041: MontenegroDefinitely wrong - Malta has used coal power for example. See for example:
https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/power-and-energy/mal...
"In 1979, a second oil crisis, this time due to the Iranian Revolution, again brought into question Malta’s energy policy and made the government seek alternatives. Between 1982 and 1987, four stream turbines were installed at the Marsa Power Station. This strategy could have worked if the environmental and human health impacts of the coal used at the power station had not caused the local population to protest. In 1987, construction of a new power plant, at Delimara, started; the plant was commissioned in 1994. In the meantime, the Marsa Power Station continued to be improved, with new turbines added to eliminate the use of coal. On January 12, 1995, Malta became independent of coal but consequently became fully dependent on oil."
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.
> Albania, Cyprus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Switzerland, Norway
I very much doubt this is true for any of those countries. In fact, I know it is untrue for Switzerland, although they did stop using it long ago (mid 20th century).
Edit: Norway actually ran a coal power plant until 2023, on Spitsbergen
It seems they consider only coal use in the 21st century in mainland Europe + UK (i.e. not Greenland, Iceland, Svalbard, etc.).
Well, sure is good the environmentalists shut down the German nuclear plants!
It would be good if we could modernize our grid to support easier exchange of power from north to south and vise versa.
Shutting down the nukes is inversely proportional to homeopathy popularity in Germany. That says it all
> Never used coal power: Albania, Cyprus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Switzerland, Norway
But It bought a lot and most of it had come from coal generation.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...
I understand China has about twice the inhabitant of USA+EU but the same consumption based CO2, am I wrong?
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?
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%
I will happily trade 10 unit of energy for just a single unit of energy, assuming I get to decide when I give the 10 units and when I can demand the 1 unit. A lot of profit in the European energy market can be made by such a "bad" deal.
The date when a country energy grid is free from fossil fuels, like coal, is when the grid has no longer any demand during the year for producing or importing energy produced by fossil fuels.
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.
But: EU is the only effective player in the world that drives energy policy outside its borders, by being a massive market with regulatory power regarding its imports.
If you look at three figures: energy use per capita, emissions per capita, and GDP per unit of energy/emissions, and include imported consumption, the EU's are all trending in a positive direction for many years now.
So stating the EU has de-industralized and its progress on shutting down coal is therefore 'fake' and misleading because it imports its industrial consumption from other countries to which it has simply offloaded its emissions, isn't true.
If major advanced economies are able to move their entire grid away from coal, it means the entire grid globally can move from coal.
"Ah", the critics say, "but manufacturing is so much more complex!"
Really? These are not countries without manufacturing. They have data centres stacked with the latest generation of Nvidia chips, electric rail, major capital cities, populations of millions...
... and of course, China agrees and is trying to move towards decarbonisation of their grid.
Yes, it'll take time, but it'll take even longer if you never start.
I mean, the UK proudly trumpets that they're coal-free, while entertaining a new coking coal mine.
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...
The whole conversation about clean energy is polluted by the complete misunderstanding of the general population of how energy demands are balanced. Saying you're replacing coal and gas with wind is just nonsense. It's one solution to a bigger problem. The big problem is how to balance your grid across peaks and troughs and that requires a diverse set of clean energy solutions, with wind being one small part of it.
Hence, in order to have RES you need to emit CO2. Deal with this. The other option, and UK goes that way, is to purchase electricity when it is lacking, paying spot prices, that's why they have such a big electricity bills, economy is down, people get mad and vote psychos.
The solution is dead simple, as France example shows. Simply use nuclear power plants and does not bother with RES, as it does not make any sense now.
Maybe, when we have technology to store efficiently electricity at scale, we can start using RES. But we just do not have that.
The end result now is that electricity in Europe is the most expensive on the World, so all manufacturing is moved to Asia, who does not bother with climate that much, that's why, despite all Europe efforts, overall CO2 emission keeps growing.
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 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.
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.
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?
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.
To anyone praising these stupid, politically incentivised initiatives - congratulations to us on making the poor and middle-classes poorer.
But it's all good - we're saving the world I guess. The poor folks can sort themselves out.
Lower population density on a grid without good connections to neighbours.
Previous underinvestment in network infrastructure.
Gas price rises combined with Ireland having less renewables that the EU average (middle of the pack for electricity, 3rd from bottom on total energy).
Maybe saving the world a bit harder would have helped keep prices down. It's certain that building more renewables now is the likeliest path to cheaper electricity.
A report supporting those claims: https://www.nerinstitute.net/sites/default/files/research/89...
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.
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.
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 energy cheap. Relying on Oil and Gas leaves us hugely at the whims of the international markets.
| now importing most of our energy
14.0% of its electricity in 2024 according to https://www.seai.ie/data-and-insights/seai-statistics/key-pu...
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.
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.
Ireland is richer than it has ever been. Poverty and housing difficulties have nothing to do with reducing emissions.
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.
I despair at these short sighted and fairly wrong on the facts views.
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.
Talk about ill informed.
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.
> 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!
The huge energy price spikes are down to wars in Ukraine (gas, which is also used for electricity production) and the Middle East.
Anyway your actual problem are data center buildouts that are causing demand to skyrocket. They've gone from 5% of your electrical demand to >20% in less than a decade, and are the primary cause of your electricity crunch.
Back in days of yore (2006/07) I read a well-argued policy paper from a quango that no longer exists where it pointed out that Ireland was one of the most fossil fuel dependent nations in the world (particularly due to oil imports).
Our energy prices first spiked around the same time, to "incentivise competition" in the words of a minister of the time.
All the while we have vast, vast reserves of potential wind energy sitting unused because of (mostly) grid and permitting failures. This was and is entirely in our control, but the government(s) (even with the sad exception of the Greens) simply haven't put enough resources into it (although the grid is getting investment, we need a lot more).
Also the critical infrastructure bill will (supposedly) help, but I'm sceptical as none of this ever seems to help.
Which is to say, that I completely agree with you that the costs here shouldn't be born by the poorer people in Ireland, and we need a whole of government approach to driving down the price of energy. This will take time, but the best time to start doing this is now.
My personal belief is that we should also aim to drive down the price of land, as the two biggest costs (for many countries) are land and energy, as they input into almost everything, but reducing land prices is a lot more controversial than reducing energy prices so we should start there.
> 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.
From what I understand Ireland has very little natural gas, very little coal and a not particularly large amount of peat. If they didn't shift towards importing all of that would be gone in the very near future.
It's a bit weird how it gets branded as a solely green move when there's clearly other motives for it.
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.
https://progressireland.substack.com/p/irish-electricity-is-...
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.
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.
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.
Source for this claim? figures show 10-15% of power is imported, not "most", and those fluctuate with wind generation.
Coal is literally just bad. It's hard as hell to transport, it's extremely inefficient to burn, and it produces a shit ton of harmful byproducts you have to clean up.
> we've graduated from providing cheap energy to now importing most of our energy.
... Eh? We've always imported most of our energy. Or, well, okay, since about the mid 19th century we've imported most of our energy. All coal used in Moneypoint was imported. We do produce some of our own gas, but it is not and never has been enough. The fraction of energy that we import has actually fallen somewhat due to wind and solar.
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)
Why is it people can clearly see the recycling scam for what it was, but the idea of coal or carbon fuels makes them entirely unable to handle any sort of thinking that isn't entirely superficial and one-sided?
Maybe, like everything else in life, it's a complex series of tradeoffs, costs, and benefits, and you decide whether the cost is worth the benefit.
And if a policy being pushed doesn't make sense when all the costs and benefits are accounted for, then someone is doing something shady and making a shit ton of money, especially if there's a huge amount of smoke and mirrors and politicized talk.
Ireland's being used for things and it's obvious those in power don't care about and don't think the Irish people being affected by these sorts of policies can or will do anything about it. As that largely seems to be the case, I have to wonder if we're going to see a repeat of what seems to happen every time a government thinks that about the Irish and takes advantage of them.
As I browse the comments here I lament that most "above average IQ" folks still don't get this simple truth.
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 ?
https://www.ft.com/content/86fdb9e4-3db4-4e4f-8e47-580a1fad2...
Made some reasonable points imo
From what, turf? Back in the 1980s Ireland was importing coal from Poland because domestic mines weren't efficient. You're full of it.
"China is by far the largest consumer and producer of coal in the world. Coal has historically been the backbone of China’s rapid industrialization and still plays a dominant role in its energy system."
- ~55–60% of China’s electricity comes from coal (varies slightly year to year).
- China consumes more coal than the rest of the world combined.
- Annual consumption: roughly 4–4.5 billion tons per year.
- China produces about 50% of global coal output
The west suffers while China does whatever it wants, at a Grand Scale.
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.
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/china-...
BREAKING NEWS: China is big.
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.
You can see here the electricity figures in Ireland: https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/IE/all/yearly
> We've graduated from providing cheap energy to now importing most of our energy. We've seen huge energy price increases as a result.
Wrong. As you can see Ireland always produced a very limited about of electricity from coal, around 11% ten years ago when wind was 10% less. In other words, wind simply replaced coal, not imports.
For the last 50 years gas provides the bulk of your electricity, but Ireland produces virtually no gas and has always imported it. The jump in prices was due to these gas prices increasing due to the Russia/Ukraine war as of 2020, it had nothing to do with import changes. Had you invested more in wind/solar, you'd be affected less.
In fact Ireland barely imports anything at all, over the last ten years the net import are close to zero. 2025 was a peak year for imports but even then imports constituted a small 13%, whereas 2024 was a year where Ireland was a net exporter, as was 2020, and 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019. In fact of the last ten years it was a net exporter 7 times, more than twice as often as the 3 years it was a net importer. And its imported when the UK has cheaper electricity prices, otherwise there'd be no reason to import.
So your entire argument isn't true. Wind/solar can beat coal on a cost-basis now, evidenced by the fact that the average existing coal plant isn't running half the time because it's more expensive, let alone building out more coal. The smartest thing to have done is mass-invest in solar/wind in a country with a population density 4x lower than the UK.
I mean, at least you shut down the coal plants, those are legit bad for the environment. Germans shut down nuclear which is clean.
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.
[2] https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/live/fifteen_minutes
However, every other number in the piece is mentioned as some multiple of Wh's (GWh typically). That makes it very hard to tell what proportion of capacity was removed from the system as a proportion of the total generating capacity. I think the writer might have served us better with the use of some helpful percentage comparisons.
From the SEAI report (2024) (https://www.seai.ie/data-and-insights/seai-statistics/key-pu...)
- Electricity demand in Ireland was 32.9 TWh in 2024, up 4.1% on 2023-levels
- Commercial services, which includes the ICT sub-sector, accounted for 41.2% of electricity demand.
- The residential sector accounted for 25.5% of electricity demand in 2024.
- Data centres accounted for 21.2% of all electricity demand in 2024.
- Data centres account for 88.2% of the increase observed in Ireland’s electricity demand since 2015.
If I've done my math correctly, Moneypoint generates about 8TWh, if operating continuously; which it's probably not. Can we say 6-7 TWh?
That is not an insubstantial portion of the total.
Our goal shouldn’t be to be coal free. Our goal should be to be 100% renewable.
If we set up our goals in terms of what we don’t want, we end up in the situation we are right now: high energy costs, very dependent on energy imports and a high risk of loosing our industry
No, our goal is to reduce CO2 emissions as quickly as possible.
Shutting down coal plants is a quick and easy win, as pretty much every possible replacement is less polluting. It might even make sense to replace them with gas turbines: base load today, peaker plant tomorrow, emergency source later on.
100% renewables is the exact opposite of "100% non-renewables" and that's including also oil, gas, etc. So "coal" is only a part of the 100% non renewables, but it seems your goal is to get rid of all the non renewables.
And here the question is: why would you want a single goal? Why 100% renewable?
What drives us should be: save where it makes sense, don't where it doesn't. Iterate every 10 years and recheck.
All these single radical goals are literally killing our economy and society. And I am not just talking about coal free or renewable.
Even the "let's tear down the windfarms" is dumb because it's radical and non sense.
Or unrelated, even this "we need to digitalize everything" (although given our jobs we would profit the most) can lead to a lot of problems (privacy, security, etc).
I don't know why we have become so radical in the last 20 years.
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.
Poland I guess?
I really hope they just turn heavily toward renewables. We have enough offshore wind in Ireland to power most of the world, if we could just build enough turbines and harness it. We could become a net exporter of green power
Here is the dashboard for electricity in Ireland.
Ireland is not industrialised in a similar way to other EU countries like Germany or Italy which has lots of heavy manufacturing. Irish industry is mostly composed of US pharmaceuticals and data centres occupying much of the energy demand. There is a bauxite facility in limerick which does come to mind but that sort of thing isn't common in Ireland.
It addresses key questions such as "What about China?" and "Can we stop it?"
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/222768021-clearing-the-a...
https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?cha...
As of 2025, the cheapest levelized cost of energy is solar ($58), onshore wind ($61), and gas combined ($78).
Although the data is US-based, European prices likely follow a similar pattern.
[0] https://www.lazard.com/media/5tlbhyla/lazards-lcoeplus-june-...
But the simple matter is thought that the economics of nuclear power simply are not delivering. They are expensive and slow to build, while at the same time wind (particularly off shore wind) and solar are getting cheaper and easier to build every year (or month even). Germany also stands out as a success story of nuclear phase-out, that by replacing these expensive to run nuclear power plant has offered the economic wiggle room to phase in renewables a lot faster then otherwise.
Look at the nuclear buildup. Vogtle in US 10 years. Hinckley Point C is estimated to be 13 years. Flamanville 3 took 17 years. All these years you put money in and get nothing out. It's a disaster for balance sheet. Instead, you can build renewables plus batteries and have it connected within a year, generating revenue.
As such, it's not really the whole story to call Ireland, "coal-free". It's the same as America outsourcing heavy manufacturing or chemicals to China and claiming environmental victory. It's true in a narrow construction of the concept; it does reduce the burden on one's own country. It is false in the sense of one's contribution to the global commons and externalizes those externalities previously more internalized. It is, in other words, a shell game. Ireland's dependence on imported energy continues to rise and the number continues to tick up on the books of other nations and down on hers, with her people paying the "guilt premium" associated with this accounting trick. They're not exactly dirty grids, but the fact remains, Ireland still relies to some extent on coal.
Also note that, though she is building OCGTs and fast CCGTs elsewhere, she converted Moneypoint not to gas but to heavy fuel oil. HFO is quite dirty stuff, only a dozen or so per cent cleaner than the coal it replaces per Ireland's own EIS. This is likely influenced by the fact that the plant was specced to burn some of the cleaner thermal coal on the market, largely from Glencore's Cerrejon mine, with pretty low sulfur and ash relative to others. So, the delta from relatively clean coal (excuse the expression) to some of the dirtiest oil; large boilers like that are likely burning No. 5 or 6, aka bunker B or C in marine. Not sure if you've ever seen (or smelled) this stuff but it's the next thing from tar.
Ireland could instead have chosen to pull in gas from the North Sea and reduced the emissions of Moneypoint by not twelve but fifty to sixty per cent with modern CCGTs. Even older, more readily-available OCGTs would give thirty to forty per cent. This is ~250mmcf, i.e. probably a 24" spur line. Though this likely necessitates a few hundred km of loop for the ring main to the west, it's less than a year's work with a competent American crew.
Instead, she chose a paltry twelve per cent a few years earlier; when the other gas peaker capacity is installed, cooling infra and existing thermal plant talent base while paying to reconstitute all those on the other side of the island.
None of this is to say Ireland's work on decarbonizing her grid isn't real, but "coal-free" rather tends to obscure the present state of things; it is generally understood to make a strong, binary truth claim that isn't subject to "mostly" and implies one is no longer dependent on coal. It therefore demands consideration of electricity's fungibility in a grid.
https://www.eirgrid.ie/celticinterconnector
Ireland has lots of problems including energy generation but you're not being fair in citing significant progress having been made here.
Your entire comment is incredibly misleading.
Denmark has one coal fired power plant left, set to close in 2028.
https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/seneste/i-dag-lukker-og-slukker-et...
Nuclear discriminates against capitalism. The cost makes the choice of nuclear irrational. The inability to insure nuclear in the private market makes it a travesty of free markets.
Am am not against "saving planet" etc. Just make sure you still have a way to survive if high tech fails. Same as with let's abolish all cash without thinking what a nightmare it can / will cause one day
If only they could harness the power of rain, Ireland would truly be an energy superpower.
[1] https://www.irishtimes.com/special-reports/2025/10/30/winds-...
Edit: instead of downvoting my post, feel free to pay my electric bill, lol
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
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.
All thanks to our Epstein-class-alien-AI-zionist-lizard overlords.
Good luck repairing your renewable energy infrastructure if you're hit by one of many different classes of attacks.
Coal and coal-burning energy production is an insurance policy, at the very least.
Countries have been getting rid of their oil refineries as well, and now look what is happening to those countries, given the Iran situation. Their price of fuel is skyrocketing, their reserves are dwindling, and panic is setting in. Hope is not a strategy.
Relying on third party supply chains for key infrastructure that would result in mass casualty if it were to vanish, is not intelligent. It's a vulnerability.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse_gas_emis...
Coal, with any available technology, is more polluting than any renewable energy source. Full life cycle including plant installation included.