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

3/9/2026 at 12:31:31 PM

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 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: Montenegro

by bramhaag

3/9/2026 at 7:17:53 PM

> Never used coal power: Albania, Cyprus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Switzerland, Norway

Definitely 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."

by arbuge

3/9/2026 at 2:05:24 PM

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.

by NicuCalcea

3/10/2026 at 3:50:59 AM

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.

by mmooss

3/10/2026 at 10:07:44 AM

Moldova has not purchased any energy from it since 2024.

I should also note it is primarily a gas plant, fuelled by extremely cheap (nearly free) gas subsidised by Russia. It only falls back to coal when supply is disrupted, which happened when Ukraine stopped transiting Russian gas on its territory.

by NicuCalcea

3/10/2026 at 4:03:51 AM

Moldavians have bigger problems that greenhouse emissions.

by Zhenya

3/10/2026 at 2:17:25 PM

Everyone claims to have bigger problems, but greenhouse gas emissions are the biggest problem.

Arguably, they are a particularly big problem to Moldovans because Russia's military is funded by greenhouse gas emissions.

by mmooss

3/10/2026 at 3:55:34 PM

Greenhouse gas emissions are a larger existential threat than global war. A global nuclear war might be more catastrophic than unchecked climate change, but probably not by much.

by estimator7292

3/10/2026 at 8:12:47 AM

Disconnect from it? If it's connected to some kind of grid then you'd have to disconnect from the whole grid, surely? And if being connected to a grid that contains a coal-fired power station counts as using coal then how many countries are really coal-free?

by bloak

3/10/2026 at 4:17:42 AM

How is it "Moldova's" then

by koakuma-chan

3/10/2026 at 6:38:25 AM

Transnistria Is a breakaway country which is only recognized by Russia&friends.

It is technically still considered Moldova by everyone else so it's not differentiated in documents from the EU and the likes.

by riffraff

3/10/2026 at 10:09:32 AM

It is not actually recognised by Russia either. It is in their best interest to maintain control over it, but officially recognise it as part of Moldova, so they can blackmail the entire country.

by NicuCalcea

3/10/2026 at 8:55:40 AM

Territory occupied does not translate to territory owned.

by bilekas

3/9/2026 at 2:36:05 PM

For Sweden, the coal plants were exclusively for cogeneration (district heating with electricity as a byproduct) and only used as peaker plants in winter. Some of them still exist but have been converted to burn biofuels instead, mostly woodchips and other byproducts from the forestry industry.

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

by renhanxue

3/10/2026 at 5:32:11 AM

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.

by ggm

3/10/2026 at 10:06:30 AM

That may be true in many places, but the Swedish forestry industry is very big, and the district heating plants really do burn mostly forestry byproducts. Of all the biofuel used in Sweden (not just for energy generation), 75% comes from forestry products, and the vast majority of it is either unrefined wood products or byproducts from Kraft process paper manufacturing (like tall oil and turpentine etc).

Specifically in district heating, 87% of the forestry-sourced fuel is unrefined wood products. Almost half of it is just bark, branches and treetops. Of all the biomass in an average mature tree logged in Sweden, 43% ends up as pulpwood, 43% as saw timber, 8% gets burned for fuel and the remaining 6% is treetops and branches which also tend to end up burned for fuel.

There is definitely a lot of debate in Sweden about sustainable forestry practices, though. The industry really wants to clearcut everything for convenience, but it's really bad for biodiversity and the general public hates it.

Source: the report Hållbarare biobränsle i fjärrvärmesektorn, Energiforsk 2023; specifically the charts on pages 14 and 15. Link: https://energiforsk.se/media/33316/2023-979-ha-llbarare-biob...

Addendum: I believe there's also been some studies and experiments involving importing olive pits from the Mediterranean olive oil industry for burning in district heating plants, but I don't think it's been done at scale.

by renhanxue

3/10/2026 at 9:08:54 AM

Even if that were the case, wouldn't it still be an essentially net-zero pollution system (disregarding small contributions from transport etc.)?

by endominus

3/10/2026 at 9:18:44 AM

Depends on the input into growing the biomass. If you are using industrial fertilizers, it's very far from net-zero. Besides that, from my memory there are studies analyzing this and I think they found it's never net-zero.

by tpm

3/10/2026 at 9:56:39 AM

In the British case… it’s being chipped and shipped from Canada and there’s doubts it’s waste wood

It makes more sense to leave trees in the ground than burning them to generate energy

by youngtaff

3/10/2026 at 10:33:59 AM

> 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.

by knorker

3/10/2026 at 10:45:11 AM

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 plants was less than 1% of total consumption, and the amount of fossil free power exported was more than 30 times greater than the amount of (potentially) fossil power imported. 1-2% fossil energy in the mix is to me not really significant, and especially not considering how much fossil free power is exported.

Sources:

Statistics Sweden table of power import and export: https://www.scb.se/hitta-statistik/statistik-efter-amne/ener...

Basic information about Swedish power generation: https://www.energiforetagen.se/energifakta/elsystemet/produk...

by renhanxue

3/10/2026 at 11:07:03 AM

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 every couple of seconds. If I only get an annual average of a breath every few seconds, I'll die.

One could show great generation and net export statistics with a sufficiently large batteryless solar installation, and still import coal power every night and cloudy day.

What is true, but can easily imply an incorrect conclusion, is that Sweden's very good in being self sufficient in clean power generation statistically. Yes, very much true. But it's largely due to geography, and not merely something to replicate. Sweden has way more viable places where hydro could be installed, than most countries (though where economical and otherwise acceptable, it already has). And it's sparsely populated; Sweden is bigger than the UK, but with one seventh the population. So if the implication is that "if we can do it, so can you" then that's false.

Luckily the political wind (including population opinion) has started to turn in favor of nuclear power, again. Maybe everything can be solar in 100 years, but we can't have 100 more years of coal.

by knorker

3/11/2026 at 6:03:12 AM

> 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.

by fulafel

3/11/2026 at 3:40:13 PM

> The european grid is interconnected so it's basically all fungible.

This is the point I'm making. It's not a counter point, it's exactly the point I'm making. Sweden "has" a bunch of coal plants, just located in Germany and Poland. This allows Sweden to skip planning for exactly what renewable is bad at.

Otherwise this is like saying "antibiotics are completely unnecessary because 99.99% of the time you don't need them, and when I do need them I just get them from a pharmacy". Right… so you do need and rely on them.

But Sweden also has a geographic electricity transportation problem. Electricity generation exists where (most) consumers are not. And this is also due to the MUCH more limited flexibility of renewables, especially hydro. Could easily be cheaper to get coal power in the south instead of hydro "shipped" from way up north. Hell, sometimes electricity in the north has a negative price.

Sweden is a good local example of why we also can't just power all of Europe from some solar panels in Sahara. Except instead it's hydro way up north.

by knorker

3/9/2026 at 1:59:57 PM

Estonia has lots of oil shale (not same thing as shale oil). They never needed to import coal, because they have their own fossil fuel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Estonia#Oil-shale

by sampo

3/9/2026 at 4:33:29 PM

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.

by jnsaff2

3/9/2026 at 1:10:26 PM

> Never used coal power:

> 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

by brazzy

3/9/2026 at 2:02:42 PM

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.).

by bramhaag

3/9/2026 at 6:45:36 PM

Iceland (never used coal to my knowledge) is missing from the list.

by runarberg

3/9/2026 at 7:38:32 PM

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

by bell-cot

3/9/2026 at 9:43:46 PM

The US is in an excellent position to massively harness wind and solar and yet right now it's dialing up the coal usage. I am comfortable celebrating Iceland's decision to not be maliciously dependent on fossil fuels.

by munk-a

3/9/2026 at 9:58:44 PM

> yet right now it's dialing up the coal usage

Reference? This seems to be false. Coal is still on decline, while solar is what's ramping up [1][2]

[1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67005

[2] https://ieefa.org/resources/energy-information-administratio...

by nomel

3/9/2026 at 11:04:12 PM

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-...

by munk-a

3/9/2026 at 11:15:52 PM

So, in both cases it's helping sustain. "Ramping up" means increasing.

Is there something I'm missing here?

by nomel

3/10/2026 at 9:16:09 PM

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.

by munk-a

3/10/2026 at 5:46:47 AM

[flagged]

by RalfWausE

3/10/2026 at 4:46:57 PM

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.

by tomhow

3/10/2026 at 9:02:50 PM

[dead]

by RalfWausE

3/9/2026 at 11:19:42 PM

I mean, the EIA says "U.S. generation fueled by coal increased by 13% in 2025 to 731 BkWh"

The article you linked is mostly about a model of 2026 and 2027 and sure, in the model coal goes away but that's not a fact about coal it's just a model.

by tialaramex

3/9/2026 at 11:30:48 PM

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.

by nomel

3/10/2026 at 8:10:15 AM

> "Ramping up" means planned to increase.

No it doesn't. It means increasing.

by lmm

3/11/2026 at 7:20:29 PM

Sure, but increasing something like fucking coal power plants isn't some instantaneous event that could start and stop at any time, putting some ambiguity at the moment between "increased" and "increasing". If plants are or will be built, it's because it's planned for development. That '-ing' isn't just present tense, it's there for the continuous/progressive aspect of it.

by nomel

3/12/2026 at 4:43:56 AM

If they produced 13% more energy from coal in 2025 than 2024, the latest point at which we have real numbers rather than projections, it's fair to say that production of energy from coal is increasing rather than decreasing.

by lmm

3/12/2026 at 5:19:19 AM

as the references point out (please re-read this chain), it increased but is not increasing. the context of what your replying to:

> The US is in an excellent position to massively harness wind and solar and yet right now it's dialing up the coal usage

they are not "dialing it up", they instead have planned reduction.

by nomel

3/13/2026 at 4:39:13 AM

> as the references point out (please re-read this chain), it increased but is not increasing.

As I pointed out (please re-read my comment), it was increasing as of the most recent time for which we have data (not projections) available.

by lmm

3/10/2026 at 10:18:02 AM

> ... celebrating Iceland's decision to not ...

Okay, but you're celebrating make-believe virtues. Iceland is also not destroying its tropical coral reefs. That sounds nice...but it has none. Nor any sort of tradition or incentive to try doing that.

The US coal thing is all about widespread memories (and myths) of sustained good economic times, in large areas of the country which now feel destitute. Millions of voters feeling that they have no future. If not that the elites want them to hurry up and die.

To paraphrase Munger - if you want different outcomes there, then you need to change the incentives.

by bell-cot

3/10/2026 at 7:23:27 AM

> 2038: Germany

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

by huhkerrf

3/10/2026 at 9:23:35 AM

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.

by SvenL

3/10/2026 at 7:50:31 AM

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

by iknowstuff

3/10/2026 at 8:21:12 AM

The anti-nuclear position in Germany is very old, and core to the existence of Greenpeace and green parties on DACH region (down to firing RPGs at reactors).

Does Russia benefit and probably fund it? Sure.

But DACH environmentalism grew from antinuclear protests, not the other way around, and thus will boycott nuclear even when it goes against their modern stated goals.

by p_l

3/10/2026 at 9:50:54 AM

Sometimes interests intersect.

by kharak

3/10/2026 at 9:25:38 AM

> 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

by nixass

3/11/2026 at 6:52:03 AM

That sounds like a neat statistic. Do you have a source containing the data or better yet a rendered map showing this?

by jwe

3/10/2026 at 1:01:43 AM

like - never ever used coal power?? very hard to believe this...

> Never used coal power: Albania, Cyprus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Switzerland, Norway

by realaaa

3/10/2026 at 7:16:01 AM

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.

by jesterson

3/9/2026 at 2:28:37 PM

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.

by deanc

3/9/2026 at 9:00:09 PM

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.

by cjblomqvist

3/9/2026 at 11:33:37 PM

The unique geography of the Scandinavian peninsula combined with very low population density makes Sweden a bit less interesting in terms of achieving zero emissions in other geographies, and I doubt Swedes would be cool with expanding hydro and nuclear to the scale required by Germany.

But yeah, I mean, good job and all. The answer for the rest of the continent is going to be wind and solar in the medium term, and probably more nuclear in the long term.

by simonask

3/10/2026 at 1:07:35 PM

Totally. Tech neutral state incentives is the way to go for sure, everybody has different environment and context to consider (same within Sweden). Southern Europe has very different opportunities (much better situation for solar for example).

Anyway, my comment was in response to the extreme comment (parent) about how all rich countries became rich using fossil fuels - implying that that's the more or less only way to transition from poor to rich. I think it's important to note that that's not necessarily the case. You don't need to destroy the environment to go from poor to rich, even though a lot of countries historically have done it that way (also noteworthy that they did it without knowing about the consequences for the environment).

by cjblomqvist

3/9/2026 at 12:11:36 PM

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.

by reedf1

3/9/2026 at 2:15:20 PM

>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.

by macspoofing

3/9/2026 at 10:15:07 PM

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.

by derriz

3/10/2026 at 3:11:04 AM

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.

by sh34r

3/10/2026 at 7:21:09 AM

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

by mastermage

3/10/2026 at 11:01:03 AM

Natural Gas is such a weird PR term coined by fossil industry. I think the term "fossil gas" is much clearer.

by Gasp0de

3/11/2026 at 11:28:17 AM

Well, the term "natural gas" is ~200 years old and was invented to distinguish it from manufactured coal gas. But other than that, you're right. It's getting tiring having to explain to people why biogas isn't "natural gas".

by sehansen

3/9/2026 at 5:23:23 PM

[flagged]

by pembrook

3/9/2026 at 8:50:48 PM

Many consider natural gas to be worse than coal due to widespread methane leakage and methane being a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.

by bryanlarsen

3/9/2026 at 10:39:52 PM

[flagged]

by pembrook

3/10/2026 at 1:09:09 AM

> As with any religion, environmentalism

Calling something a religion is a lazy and disingenuous way to dismiss it. The effects of airborne and waterborne pollution on human health has been the focus of scientific investigation for centuries at least. Ecosystem destruction is not "a religious belief" - it's something which has been measured, carefully recorded and studied using scientific methods.

> at 1/1000th the cost of re-wiring our entire energy system around renewables

This is alarmist hyperbole. Renewables now account for about 35% of the global electricity generation mix. There are countless examples of countries that run grids where renewables account for more than 80% of the electricity mix. Even if you just consider wind and solar, many countries are approaching 50% penetration in the space of 20 or 25 years without "re-wiring their entire their entire energy systems".

Yes NG generation is the only fossil tech still standing in terms of being able to compete at any level with modern generation tech but it is being squeezed. Batteries surpassed NG in terms of economics for peaking sometime around 2020/2021 - which is reflected by the share of new capacity investment since then.

> industrializing 3B+ people using windmills

A windmill is a device used to mill materials that happens to be powered by wind, like a watermill, or a pepper mill or a paper/wood/etc mill. I'm not sure what that has to do with electricity generation.

by derriz

3/10/2026 at 1:29:25 AM

I think they may be referring to “wind turbines”.

by vages

3/10/2026 at 1:35:53 AM

Most methane leakage is in Russia. Good luck making and enforcing better standards there.

by bryanlarsen

3/9/2026 at 12:23:45 PM

I agree. Whenever numbers show that China is the largest CO2 polluter currently, it needs to be mentioned that China manufactures much of the world's physical goods.

by aurareturn

3/9/2026 at 12:32:37 PM

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...

by cogman10

3/9/2026 at 1:09:39 PM

https://globalenergymonitor.org/projects/global-coal-plant-t...

They have more coal power plants planned and your data hickup worked out during recensions and covid.

by 21asdffdsa12

3/9/2026 at 1:51:35 PM

This doesn't mean what you think it does:

- China is also decommissioning older plants.

- These new coal plants aren't running 24x7

- Peak coal usage is likely to be very soon in China (this year even according to some); after that coal usage flatten and start declining; all the way to a planned net zero in the 2060s.

The newer plants are designed to be more efficient, more flexible, and less polluting than the older ones. They are better at starting/stopping quickly/cheaply. Older coal plants used big boilers that had to heat up to build up steam before being able to generate power. This makes stopping and starting a plant slow and expensive. Because they consume a lot of fuel just to get the plant to the stage where it can actually generate power. The more often plants have to be stopped and started, the more wasteful this is. With the newer plants this is less costly and faster.

This makes them more suitable to be used in a non base load operational model where they can be spun up/down on a need to have basis. This is essential in a power grid that is dominated by the hundreds of GW of solar, wind, and battery.

by jillesvangurp

3/9/2026 at 6:37:39 PM

What a lot of people also miss is that we’re in the age demographic bomb, where the global population is both aging rapidly and declining at the same time I.e. japanification

This means that global consumption will decline too which coincides with both factories and power plants shutting down

by chaostheory

3/10/2026 at 12:38:37 PM

Great- Lets reuse the energy we have for AI-Centers..

by 21asdffdsa12

3/10/2026 at 2:26:15 PM

It kind of makes sense when you think we’re going to be running out of working adults like Japan, Germany, South Korea, Italy, and China to name a few countries. Even developing countries have seen their birthrates plummet. It’s like Children of Men IRL

by chaostheory

3/9/2026 at 1:30:32 PM

In 2024, well after Covid, 88% of new electric capacity added in China came from renewables.

https://www.eia.gov/international/analysis/country/chn

Their existing grid uses coal because they have coal, just like the US uses gas because it has gas. And obviously as old coal plants are retired they're going to build new ones. They don't use the new plants for additional capacity. As they add more solar and storage, which they're building a lot of, they're going to absolutely crush the coal burning too. It's literally a national security issue for them.

by triceratops

3/9/2026 at 3:34:36 PM

An EV running half on coal is better than a gasoline car for carbon emissions. A similar story for heat pumps.

China is more electrified than most Western nations and getting more so faster than Europe or the US:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-as-a-share-of...

by ZeroGravitas

3/10/2026 at 9:40:35 AM

> An EV running half on coal is better than a gasoline car for carbon emissions.

Source? Does that take into account full life cycle (including manufacturing)?

by bocytron

3/10/2026 at 10:13:50 AM

https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/ev-fossil-cars-climate

This even compares cars built in an unrealistic 100% coal grid, and fuelled on 100% coal grid. Driving 14k miles a year for 10 years a Tesla Model 3 built under those extreme conditions beats a gas Fiat 500

by ZeroGravitas

3/9/2026 at 2:23:10 PM

As other posters below you have pointed out, it's not as simple as you make it out. You can't just stop building power plants overnight. The population and demands of China are growing and those needs need to be met immediately. There is no simpler, more understood way of rolling out new energy than building coal & gas power plants.

But look at the data. They are building clean energy solutions at a faster rate than any other country on the planet - by a huge margin. Scaling clean energy solutions is what we need, and it has to be done alongside the gradual phase-out of coal and gas.

by deanc

3/9/2026 at 7:16:50 PM

>The population and demands of China are growing

The population of China has been decreasing since 2022.

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=population+of+china+is+decr...

by Jblx2

3/10/2026 at 1:42:16 AM

The percentage of China in extreme poverty has been decreasing for the last few decades.

by thorncorona

3/10/2026 at 1:32:11 AM

[flagged]

by uriahlight

3/10/2026 at 5:30:38 AM

Lots of people who don't read the HN Guidelines, apparently:

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by Qwertious

3/9/2026 at 2:37:45 PM

As other comments already point out, chinese coal power plants do not always operate under full load. They also decomission older more polluting ones.

Setting that aside, China has also dramatically pushed the electrification of their transportation sector like no one else. Considering BEVs and other electric modes of transport require less primary energy than fossil fuel equivalents, this checks out.

by moooo99

3/9/2026 at 10:43:52 PM

Supposedly they have been replacing old dirty coal plants with new cleaner ones alongside massive developments in renewables and nuclear. Getting air pollution controlled as fast as possible requires doing everything at once.

by SchemaLoad

3/9/2026 at 2:41:16 PM

Coal is a lot cheaper and easier than modern energy sources when your goal is modernizing rural areas. Meanwhile, urban centers are decommissioning old emissive power plants and shifting to renewables. It's a fine way to do green transition and rural development.

by islandfox100

3/9/2026 at 10:54:40 PM

By what measure? Coal hasn't been competitive for decades and the only way it had remained competitive in terms of cost per MWh even back then was if you burned it in huge (> 1GW) plants. 1GW plants are the very opposite of what you want to electrify rural areas - construction is slow and expensive, operating large plants requires considerable and qualified head-count, logistics is an issue and they require high capacity and expensive transmission systems.

And if your minimum unit size is 1GW then you lose the flexibility to roll out the tech incrementally - the average modern coal plant requires 3 to 5 weeks per year for scheduled downtime for maintenance - so your first 1GW coal plant requires a bunch of other generation sources to cover demand during these periods.

Solar and batteries are the obvious solution for rural electrification: scaleable, cheaper/simpler to deploy - no large scale civil engineering involved, trivial to "operate", effective without the support of big transmission systems and it's possible to buy everything off-the-shelf.

by derriz

3/9/2026 at 7:47:16 PM

I disagree.

Coal requires transport and extraction which are both pretty expensive processes.

In my home town of ~300 people, there was just a couple of houses which used coal for heating. That's because sourcing and transporting coal was quiet expensive.

Electric heating was much more common. Even the old expensive baseboard resistive heaters.

When we talk about extreme rural areas, what you end up finding is solar and batteries end up being the most preferred energy sources. This has been true for decades. That higher upfront cost is offset by not having to transport fuel.

It's why you'll find a lot of cabins in pretty remote locations are ultimately solar powered. This is long before the precipitous price drop of solar.

by cogman10

3/10/2026 at 12:50:43 AM

How is coal cheaper and easier than buying and deploying solar panels and batteries. Both of which require basically zero additional infrastructure to deploy.

Last I checked mining and transporting coal required quite a lot of heavy industry equipment to do even vaguely economically.

If coal was cheaper and easier than other sources of energy, then the US would be building more coal power plants. But even with the Trump administration placing its weighty thumb on the scale to try and “save coal”. Coal plants are still being shutdown due to simple economics.

If existing plants can compete with renewables, to hard to understand how adding the cost of building new plants is going to change that.

by avianlyric

3/9/2026 at 5:26:27 PM

Baseload coal plants are also being converted into peaker plants to deal with solar and wind intermittency.

by red75prime

3/9/2026 at 12:39:16 PM

I wonder if on-shorting manufacturing would mean a higher increase in CO2 because China is leading the world in green energy creation.

by aurareturn

3/10/2026 at 7:17:07 AM

It should be noted that the research from this article acknowledges that official Chinese coal consumption figures are often unreliable or subject to massive retrospective revisions. To compensate, the author uses "apparent consumption" (production + imports - exports +/- inventory changes) and power generation data. This methodology assumes perfect reporting of coal production and inventory levels across thousands of mines and plants. Historically, "statistical discrepancies" in Chinese energy data have masked millions of tons of CO2. If local provinces underreport coal use to meet "Dual Control" energy targets, the "flat or falling" trend could be a reporting artifact rather than a physical reality.

The article also notes that solar and wind capacity grew significantly faster than actual generation, suggesting "unreported curtailment" (where clean energy is wasted because the grid can’t handle it). If curtailment is rising, it means the "clean energy boom" is hitting a hard infrastructure ceiling. The research assumes that if grid issues are resolved, emissions will fall further. However, if the grid cannot integrate this power fast enough, the 290GW of coal power currently under construction will be called upon to fill the gap, potentially leading to a sharp emissions rebound in 2026–2027.

Further, a major driver of the emissions drop is the 7% decline in cement and 3% decline in steel emissions, linked to the ongoing real estate slump. This is a cyclical economic event, not necessarily a green technological victory. If the Chinese government pivots to a new stimulus package (e.g. massive "New Infrastructure" or high-tech manufacturing zones) to save GDP growth, the demand for steel and cement could surge again. The research treats the real estate decline as a permanent plateau, but China’s history of state-led investment suggests that industrial emissions can be turned back on by policy shifts.

Further, the analysis focuses almost exclusively on CO2. China is the world's largest emitter of methane, primarily from coal mine leakages. Even if CO2 emissions from burning coal are flat, continued coal production to feed the coal-to-chemical industry (which grew 12% in this report) results in significant methane venting. If you account for the Global Warming Potential (GWP) of methane, the total greenhouse gas trend might look much less optimistic than the CO2-only trend.

Further, the report credits a 3% increase in hydropower for helping suppress coal. Hydropower in China is extremely volatile and dictated by weather patterns (e.g. the 2022–2023 droughts). A single dry year in the Sichuan or Yunnan provinces can force a massive, immediate pivot back to coal-fired power to prevent blackouts. The 21-month trend may be as much a result of favorable rainfall as it is of solar panels, making it fragile and reversible.

Further, the report highlights a 12% growth in emissions from the chemical industry, driven by coal-to-liquids and coal-to-gas projects. This suggests that China is not decarbonizing its economy so much as re-carbonizing its industrial feedstocks. As China seeks energy security to reduce its reliance on imported oil and gas, it is building a massive coal-based chemical infrastructure. These emissions are harder to abate than power sector emissions and could eventually offset the gains made by wind and solar.

Ultimately, China is still the largest polluter (in every sense of the word) by a large margin. It's nice to see them taking steps to curb this, but we should all remember that any environmental benefits are purely coincidental to their goals of energy independence. We should expect them to rely on a diverse mix of sources - including the 8+ "mega" coal power plants coming online every month.

by Gareth321

3/9/2026 at 12:49:37 PM

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.

by einr

3/9/2026 at 3:02:13 PM

> 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.

To be fair, there's a large (~300mn) agricultural population in China who don't use developed country levels of energy. Nonetheless, this is still good.

by disgruntledphd2

3/9/2026 at 3:21:28 PM

Rural areas do not use much energy but Chinese cities are also more energy efficient per capita because of density and use of public transportation, walking, or electric mini scooters.

by aurareturn

3/10/2026 at 4:10:58 AM

It’s amazing what freedom of movement and association can accomplish.

by Zhenya

3/9/2026 at 5:51:00 PM

Export is only a small part of their emissions.

by vimy

3/9/2026 at 1:04:19 PM

There are existing metrics that adjust for this. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-emissions...

by rsanek

3/9/2026 at 11:03:03 PM

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?

by aziaziazi

3/9/2026 at 3:19:09 PM

Europe is less industrial than in the past, but by every measure I can find many countries (especially Germany, Poland, Slovakia, Italy) are significantly more industrialized than the US - around 1.5x to 3x as much industrial activity and employment per capita, depending on the measure. Even the very least industrialized of the major EU nations (e.g. Spain, Greece) only just drop down to match the US numbers per-capita.

by pimterry

3/9/2026 at 5:49:46 PM

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?

by owenversteeg

3/12/2026 at 1:27:46 PM

I'm not sure I agree with your list.

Aircraft:

Airbus seems to be leagues ahead of Boeing, not just in the civilian market, but also in military aircraft. Just look at their competing modern military tankers: the Boieng KC-46 is a worse plane than the Airbus A330 MRTT, but had huge cost overruns and delays.

EU is also at the cutting edge in helicopters, in fact 3 of the 5 new classes of manned helicopters introduced by the US military in the 21st century are from the EU: the MH-139, UH-72 and TH-73.

Submarines:

The Swedish Gotland and Blekinge class, and the German type 212 are both ahead of anything the US has. Wrt. bigger submarines, I don't think there's enough public information to argue that the French Triomphant-class is worse than the US Ohio-class

Advanced missiles:

The IRIS family, MBDA MICA and MBDA Meteor are cutting edge, European air-to-air missiles. MBDA also has a set of modern long, medium and short range anti-shipping missiles: the Otomat, Exocet and Marte. And that's on top of the evolutions of the Saab RBS 15 and Kongsberg/Diehl/Nammo 3SM. And the Swedish Saab NLAW anti-tank missile has been very successful with Ukraine in the past four years.

Cutting edge medical equipment:

Medical equipment is a huge field and very diverse and specialized, so it's easy to miss the areas where the EU is cutting edge. Just some examples I know of:

Siemens and Phillips are still top dogs in MRI machines. Three of the top five hearing aid companies are Danish: Demant, GN Store Nord and WS Audiology[0]. German Karl Storz is _the_ world leader in urology equipment. Danish Ambu is _the_ leader in single use endoscopes. Finnish Planmeca is a leader in dental equipment and their subsidiary Planmed one of the top 3 mammography companies in the world. Danish 3Shape and German exocad are more-or-less the only choices in dental implant CAD/CAM. Just to give a few examples

High voltage grid equipment:

Europe has been constructing a lot wind farms, many of them off-shore, and a decent amount of high-voltage, international electricity connections in recent decades. Most of that has been with European-made equipment. Some of the companies manufacturing that in Europe: Danish NKT, German Siemens and Swiss/Swedish Hitachi Energy (formerly ABB Power Grids) are three I know on top of my head. And then there are companies like Alstom that makes all the infrastructure around electric rail.

Ships:

European navies use warships built in Europe and I've seen nothing to suggest they are worse ships than Chinese warships. So the technology and shipyards are there to produce cutting-edge merchant ships, it's just not cost-effective.

Electric motors:

I've seen nothing to suggest Chinese motors have surpassed anything Swiss/Swedish ABB or Simens motors can do. And there are a ton of smaller, specialized motor manufacturers, e.g. Danish Grundfos that makes specialized motors for pumps.

Steel, aluminum:

The EU is self-sufficient in steel. A quick list of major companies producing steel in Europe: Spanish Acerinox, Luxembourgish ArcelorMittal, Austrian Voestalpine, German ThyssenKrupp, Italian Riva Group, Finnish Outokumpo, German Salzgitter, Swedish SSAB and French Vallourec.

Wrt. aluminum, the EU isn't quite self-sufficient. But ~75% of the imports are from Norway, Turkey, Iceland and Switzerland. So it depends on your definition of Europe.

Oil:

Oil is a commodity. You don't really gain anything technologically from producing it yourself, on the contrary it's seen as almost a curse, re:Dutch disease and so.

Cutting edge pharma:

If there's any category of company that's permanent fixture of EU stock indexes, it's pharma. To give just one example, Biontech, developer one of the two main Covid vaccines, is German.

Wind turbines:

In wind turbines Danish Vestas is number one and Spanish/German Siemens Gamesa is number two. The Chinese are catching up fast, but they're still behind.

Trains:

Spanish Talgo, French Alstom and German Siemens are all world-class EU train companies. Stadler is world-class, but Swiss, so it could also count. Then there's Hitachi Rail Italy (formerly AnsaldoBreda). As a Dane, I'm unwilling to call anything related to AnsaldoBreda "world-class", but the driverless trains they have supplied to the Copenhagen Metro meet the mark.

So I'd argue that there's at least 10 more categories where the EU is at least tied.

0: the last two are Swiss Sonova and American Starkey.

by sehansen

3/9/2026 at 12:19:01 PM

Air quality will improve, just not CO2

by bananzamba

3/9/2026 at 12:34:46 PM

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.

by ceejayoz

3/9/2026 at 12:47:59 PM

Coal probably kills more people in a single day than all nuclear accidents ever combined

by nixass

3/9/2026 at 1:25:58 PM

It's worse than that, it's every 3 to 7 hours of fossil fuel pollution roughly equaling the total death toll of all nuclear power accidents in history (around 4000 indirectly, most from cancer resulting from Chernobyl - but there's only around 100 total in a direct way).

by brynnbee

3/9/2026 at 1:02:20 PM

Probably but damage from nuclear accidents isn't only measured in deaths. No coal plant accident has caused an exclusion zone for 40 years.

by wolvoleo

3/9/2026 at 1:07:21 PM

I think that depends on where you draw the line around the term "coal plant." There have been plenty of coal ash disasters that result in years of exclusion (for purposes of habitation, drinking water, fishing, etc.)[1][2][3][4]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_Creek_flood

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_County_coal_slurry_spil...

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_County_water_crisis

by woodruffw

3/9/2026 at 4:49:43 PM

Only because the damage is more diffuse.

Have you ever seen the common medical advice that pregnant women should avoid eating more than a few servings of seafood every week, and avoid certain kinds entirely, because they’re all contaminated with mercury? A huge portion of that mercury comes from burning coal. How’s that for an exclusion zone?

by wat10000

3/9/2026 at 4:55:33 PM

Or for a big long list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Superfund_sites

by ceejayoz

3/9/2026 at 2:48:36 PM

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.

by happosai

3/9/2026 at 8:55:19 PM

Nature would enjoy that. The economy not so much, depending on location. Around San Onofre (decommissioned now), a 30 mile Chernobyl-size exclusion zone would cover big chunks of Orange County and San Diego County. The US government recommended a 50 mile exclusion zone around Fukushima. 50 miles would cover southern Los Angeles and millions of people.

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]

by robotresearcher

3/10/2026 at 7:16:23 AM

I wonder what is nuclear equivalent of pollution in Los Angeles.

by GoblinSlayer

3/9/2026 at 1:24:20 PM

If you look at net damage to the planet, fossil fuel burning energy sources kill literally 8 million+ people a year. Coal plants are vastly more radioactive than nuclear plants, and the effects of burning coal will have a vastly outsized share of damage to the planet in the long than nuclear. Its effects are just less concentrated to a single area.

by brynnbee

3/9/2026 at 1:56:21 PM

And not all nuclear plants are the same. I don’t think it’s reasonable at all to compare Chernobyl to modern reactor designs, just because they both use the word “nuclear”.

Apso not sure if you are including coal mining, and all of the deaths and negative health outcomes as a result of the industry

by catlifeonmars

3/9/2026 at 1:26:13 PM

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.

by panick21_

3/9/2026 at 2:14:10 PM

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 without first performing a nuclear decontamination process due to all the radioisotopes in the coal.

That said, perhaps that's actually a problem with the coal plants rather than nuclear standards: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-69285-4

> When looking at western countries like France, it shows how incredibly safe the whole industry is end to end.

Relative to coal, absolutely. But don't assume western countries are immune to propaganda on these things, nuclear reactors are there for the spicy atoms, not the price tag or public safety.

by ben_w

3/11/2026 at 1:56:02 AM

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.

by panick21_

3/11/2026 at 10:51:06 AM

What I didn't mention, in terms of propaganda, the anti-nuclear people are way ahead of any pro-nuclear propaganda. Its not even remotely close. The anti nuclear-weapons movement an environmental movement from the 1970s spread myths that are still repeated an often with emotional attachment.

My parents who lived in central Europe during Chernobyl hate nuclear power, while believing lots of nonsense that was in the news back then.

by panick21_

3/11/2026 at 11:32:16 AM

I have heard that the anti-nuclear propaganda is funded by other nuclear states, because of the aforementioned value of reactors (and their scientists and engineers) to weapons programs.

I have no idea if that's true, but it sounds very plausible.

However, if it was true, it would make it very much easier for governments to justify big spends on pro-nuclear propaganda. I mean, the USA managed to make test-detonations into a tourism opportunity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Las_Vegas#Atomic_te...

by ben_w

3/11/2026 at 11:27:49 AM

> 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.

Yes indeed. But that wasn't why they were built*, and that safety comes with an enormous cost. Ironically not including the exclusion zone, even with that included the amortised cost is quite small, but rather all the things that Chernobyl didn't have but should've plus all the international inspections and regulations to make sure nobody's secretly got a weapons program, either deliberately or via organised crime.

* Even just plain simple diversity of energy supply is good, as per another comment I made on this topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47309196

> 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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samosely

That's a tiny sample size, consisting of people who are in poverty (and already mostly elderly) and can therefore be expected to have unusual health outcomes. Which could be higher or lower cancer rates, depending on what else is going on. Like, cancer won't get you if you pickle your liver too hard first with moonshine.

Though yes, the linear relationship between radiation and harm is known to be an oversimplification.

> Not sure what 'spicy' means in this context.

Radioisotopes. They're really useful for a lot of stuff, but the options for making them are mostly "fission plant" or "particle accelerator". This includes but is not limited to weapons.

> 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.

The cheapest are cheap, but the average and the trend line says they're mostly now a worse option than PV+batteries. Your milage, as the saying goes, may vary, so I wouldn't be even mildly surprised if e.g. Alaska says "hydro and nuclear" given this graph: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Alaska_electricity_genera...

> 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.

Indeed. It was terrible for the environment and general population health that we didn't have a huge roll-out of nuclear power up until the 2010s when renewables got interesting.

But unfortunately, although even the full cost (both monetary and to lives lost) of Chernobyl would, if amortised over all reactors, be much smaller than for fossil plants, the scale of that accident would have been an existential threat to many smaller nations. Arguably, it was existential damage to the USSR, even. People don't want to be subjected to someone else's game of Russian Roulette, not even when the overall odds of survival go up.

by ben_w

3/10/2026 at 7:10:43 PM

>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!

by opo

3/10/2026 at 3:12:54 AM

Coal ash is more radioactive than nuclear waste, too.

by sh34r

3/9/2026 at 1:28:17 PM

Why even make it about nuclears vs coal? Both are bad, both are hazards and both are not green energy.

by sunaookami

3/9/2026 at 2:51:08 PM

Because coal desposits in the ground have bits of Uranium and Thorium which are radioactive, they get concentrated in coal fly ash, and blow out the chimney in the smoke from a coal power plant, and kill people, they leach into the soil and waterways, and kill people.

That is, nuclear power plants only kill people by radioactivity in the case of an accident. Coal power plants do it in normal operation. As well as coal dust having a PM2.5 dust problem which kills people.

Make it about nuclear vs coal because people say coal is better than nuclear because it's not scary radiation, and it actually is.

> "Both are bad"

Nuclear generates more power from a Kg of fuel, with less CO2 pollution and fewer deaths. It's not bad, but even if it was bad it's not "both sides", it's much less bad.

[yes coal disasters also kill hundreds of people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aberfan_disaster ]

by jodrellblank

3/9/2026 at 1:40:47 PM

Because people are petrified of nuclear but fine with coal. The opposite should be true.

I don’t think nuclear is the answer to things. But replacing every ounce of coal used for fuel with nuclear would still be a win.

by ceejayoz

3/9/2026 at 1:55:40 PM

Nuclear energy can be used to generate 24x7 energy as the grid-power to supply energy to a country whereas Solar and Wind require batteries.

I think that the last time I checked, when you take into factor the CO2 emissions and everything, Nuclear is the best source of Energy.

> I don’t think nuclear is the answer to things

I think that I am interested in seeing thorium based reactors or development with that too. That being said, Nuclear feels like the answer to me.

Feel free to correct me if you think I am wrong but I don't think that there is any better form of energy source than nuclear when you factor in everything.

by Imustaskforhelp

3/9/2026 at 2:27:04 PM

Batteries are cheaper and faster to make in large quantities.

No economy on the planet needs 24/7 peak power production. The times humans work correspond nicely with the times the sun is out.

by ceejayoz

3/9/2026 at 3:23:45 PM

Daytime doesn't mean the sun is out; the UK has heavy cloud cover and sunset near 4pm in mid-winter. https://grid.iamkate.com/ shows the UK is currently getting 10% of grid power from Solar at 3:30pm in March.

by jodrellblank

3/9/2026 at 4:33:06 PM

Sure. That's why there's the "interconnectors" section further down; the UK can take advantage of the fact that it's rarely simultaneously dark and zero wind across entire continents.

by ceejayoz

3/9/2026 at 2:38:02 PM

> Batteries are cheaper and faster to make in large quantities.

Yes I agree but their extraction at scale is still very C02 Expensive.

> No economy on the planet needs 24/7 peak power production. The times humans work correspond nicely with the times the sun is out.

With Nuclear energy, let's face it. If you have a nuclear plant running, the input is just some uranium which we have plenty of. Thereotically we have no problem with running at peak power production.

You are also forgetting that Sun can be blocked during times of rains and Wind is unpredictable as well.

If you can work with solar panels only that's really really great. Unfortunately that's not how the world works or how I see it function :(

You are forgetting that markets operate after work and the late night culture and so many other things. You need lights at energy and quite a decent bit. You are also forgetting that if we ever get Electric vehicles then we would need energy during late night as well.

A lot of energy in general is still needed during nights and would we be still burning coal for that?

With all of this, I am not sure why you'd not like Nuclear?

by Imustaskforhelp

3/9/2026 at 2:59:08 PM

> You are also forgetting that Sun can be blocked during times of rains and Wind is unpredictable as well.

We already have wires that cross continents to smooth out supply variations. It's exceedingly rare you get no sun and no wind over entire continents for an extended period.

> You are forgetting that markets operate after work and the late night culture and so many other things.

I'm not forgetting it, they just use less power.

You can see this easily in charts of supply/demand throughout the day: https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook#section-net-demand-tren...

> A lot of energy in general is still needed during nights and would we be still burning coal for that?

Again, batteries.

by ceejayoz

3/9/2026 at 9:38:35 PM

Its not just about enough sun and wind capacity. There is already over supply in lot of the world. But the supply curve doesnt match the daily DYNAMIC demand curve so grid ops still dependent on coal and gas for different reasons. It becomes about what happens during unpredicted demand spikes, or when congestion on those wires happens whose load gets priority? which producers get curtailed? etc etc That moves probs into the political domain. You can watch daily grid ops live and see the probs. Wars and the weather randomly take down wires and substations all the time. If you can move people and factories to follow the wind and the sun then maybe you get demand and supply curves to match easier.

by gotwaz

3/10/2026 at 1:31:46 PM

This is why we will overbuild solar/wind and store the extra for night time.

by ceejayoz

3/9/2026 at 3:32:03 PM

> We already have wires that cross continents to smooth out supply variations. It's exceedingly rare you get no sun and no wind over entire continents for an extended period.

I can be wrong but you would probably lose tons of efficiency even within High Voltage DC lines if everyday late night we take energy from different countries. Also this is getting outside of topic of discussion for me because one of the reasons we want Nuclear or Green energy in general is also the environmental plus the sovereign plus the long term affordability plans.

Another point from your first comment but if we run peak production in nuclear say in a country A, then the country A can also give power to Country B at late night similar to what you are proposed for solars.

> Again, batteries.

Once again, within my first comment I raise issue of battery. You mention a comment and I respond and then we get to batteries again.

I have no problem with solar at all without batteries but batteries really flip the equation in terms of environmental concerns.

My question is plain and simple, Why not Nuclear? I understand, I am not against Solar. Although environmentally, I feel like battery is a valid concern.

I am just saying that long term, Nuclear seems to be the better/best option. Why not Nuclear? That is a question which it seems that you may not have answered and that's a discussion worth having as well In my opinion too.

We can agree on this, correct?

by Imustaskforhelp

3/9/2026 at 7:39:09 PM

HVDC is more efficient than you think, 3.5% losses per 1000km. Which means intracontinental is obviously good, and intercontinental will work in some situations.

Nuclear power is expensive, enough that “what about night” is solve by building extra solar and batteries. Also, renewables wreck the economics of base load power that needs to run all the time to pay back loan, but can’t compete with solar during the day.

by ianburrell

3/9/2026 at 4:35:40 PM

> You mention a comment and I respond and then we get to batteries again.

Yes. Because they're the answer here.

> Also this is getting outside of topic of discussion for me because one of the reasons we want Nuclear or Green energy in general is also the environmental plus the sovereign plus the long term affordability plans.

Good luck with nuclear sovereignty, if that's your concern. How many uranium mines are in the UK?

> Why not Nuclear?

/me gestures at the last 50 years of historical evidence

"Why not try nuclear" is like "why not try communism?" for physics nerds. We have tried it.

by ceejayoz

3/9/2026 at 5:40:36 PM

> Good luck with nuclear sovereignty, if that's your concern. How many uranium mines are in the UK?

I can't speak about UK but considering how cheap Uranium is, can UK not do cost analysis. Uranium is abundant material compared to Oil/Coal.

> /me gestures at the last 50 years of historical evidence

> "Why not try nuclear" is like "why not try communism?" for physics nerds. We have tried it.

Maybe, but I think that, I can speak about the problem within US which I can better explain but US had nuclear fearmongering attempts and Senators passed laws which increased regulations on it to the point that some regulations contradict past regulations.

Nuclear power plants being built on loan in such a flimsy regulatory market was what lead to the downfall essentially within US

Nuclear fearmongering and lobbying efforts from Oil Industry as they are one of the most strong opposers of nuclear energy[0]

Once again, how do I explain this but nuclear produces 3.2x less carbon emissions than Solar[1]

We are able to build hydropower plants, we are able to launch spaceships into moon and outer space. It's definitely possible to build nuclear if lobbying effort decreases.

I'd say that its our dependence on Oil and Coal which have been the problem. I have nothing against solar and that is something that I am saying from the start. At some point we should look towards transition towards nuclear as well. To give up on that would simply not be ideal.

[0]: https://climatecoalition.org/who-opposes-nuclear-energy/

[1]: https://solartechonline.com/blog/how-much-co2-does-solar-ene...

by Imustaskforhelp

3/9/2026 at 5:48:04 PM

> I can't speak about UK but considering how cheap Uranium is, can UK not do cost analysis. Uranium is abundant material compared to Oil/Coal.

Wait until you hear how cheap and abundant sunlight and wind are!

Economically useful uranium deposits are only proven in a handful of countries.

> We are able to build hydropower plants, we are able to launch spaceships into moon and outer space. It's definitely possible to build nuclear if lobbying effort decreases.

This is the "well we haven't tried real communism" argument again.

by ceejayoz

3/9/2026 at 7:52:52 PM

Alright, So I think that some/most of my talking points were very inspired from the michael moore's documentary on the topic and I re-watched it after reading your comments. (Although Michael doesn't talk about Nuclear in the shortcomings)

I was going to ask you 3-4 questions but then I searched them upon myself and I do think that the results are more (positive?) than I thought.

Solar could feed world's energy needs by 0.3% and I think that Excess Solar could be used for green Hydrogen etc. too when needed for burstable energy source and smart grids in general to fix the ramp-up/ramp-down problem

I think one of the only things that I was sort of worried about mainly was the fact that Batteries produce lots of Co2 emissions and harm to the planet when mined but it seems that they have lifespan of about 10 years and can be carbon negative 3-4 years.

I don't know, I go through waves of doubt over Solar. I might need to learn more about Solar because I feel like I can just agree to whatever side I hear the recent data's from. Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics it seems.

But I feel like although solar is right direction too, we probably need smarter grids and just improvements within grid infrastructure in general too. Another point about Solar could be that there can be a more personal adoption of it whereas I can't build my own nuclear power plant so I do agree with you.

I'd still say that there is a lot of greenwashing in the Climate Change community to treat wood-chips and trees as fuel source and all the problems that stem from that with timber industry.

So although there are short-comings in Solar given its intermittent nature. I do agree that unless Govt.s create nuclear, it could be a good bet for personal actions/ even Govt.s to diversify at the very least from Oil.

I still think that though there is something wrong where People are wrongfully worried about nuclear. India for example had 3% of its energy coming from Nuclear and I looked at wiki and we planned even more but anti nuclear protests started happening after Fukushima Disaster :(

I am still really interested about Thorium Reactors and the race towards building it though. They are mostly disaster-free and Indian in particular has quite a large reserve of Thorium (25% of the world supply). The govt. is working on making 100GW to raise thorium's ratio in energy to almost ~10% estimate from 3% till 2047 which would still be impressive given that total energy would skyrocket as well till then.

India has true chances of being Energy Independent long term if it focuses on nuclear and Solar both rather than focusing on Solar given any advancement in Thorium reactor will be huge for us. For reference Coal : Thorium power ratio for same mass is 1:3.5 Million and its even more efficient than Uranium.

Also Thorium cannot be used for Nuclear Bombs in the sense of a fission unless you drop it at someone complete point blank but at that point its worthless compared to missiles so we can genuinely share this technology all across the world.

Thorium Reactors long term feel the future to me. So maybe I am too bullish on Thorium.

Solar is nice but atleast personally, Investments in Thorium Reactors could make India Energy Independent given 25% of the supply. We also recently found a huge jackpot in lithium and other minerals in Kashmir recently so I suppose long term India can be sovereign in manufacturing batteries for Solar production as well.

There is such a massive possibility in nuclear especially more so for India and general consensus also being within Scientific community that nuclear energy is cleanest forms of energy. The Combination means that, I'd want my govt. to take some risks in nuclear research/projects given how big the reward can be and that's also why I vocally support Nuclear. Much more than Solar. But I'd say that any govt. has their own risk profile and maybe Solar can be boring but works technology for Energy Independence so I just hope that Solar & Thorium both show some good numbers long term as well. So it isn't as if I am anti Solar as much as I am very pro nuclear energy long term.

Relevant Video: Thorium Reactors: Why is this Technology Quite So Exciting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSFo_92cJ-U

by Imustaskforhelp

3/9/2026 at 1:51:14 PM

Respectfully, Can you tell me more about it because I genuinely don't know how you think Nuclear energy is bad. It's one of the cleanest forms of energy.

Is there any particular reason why you think Nuclear is bad in all honesty as its worth having a discussion here? Why do you feel Nuclear Energy is a hazard?

I understand if you feel Chernobyl or any event makes it sound dangerous but rather, Please take a look at this data on the number of death rates per unit of electricity production[0]

Oil is roughly 615x more deadly than nuclear. Nuclear, Solar and Wind (the renewables) are all less deadly and are 0.03,0.02 and 0.04 respectively and nuclear is a reliable source of energy source which can be used in actual generation.

Nuclear is very much a green energy. I'd like to hear your opinion about it.

[0]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...

by Imustaskforhelp

3/10/2026 at 7:33:42 AM

Nuclear plants are great if they actually happen to get built and every person designing and operating them and storing the waste never makes a single mistake

by garbagewoman

3/10/2026 at 8:24:52 AM

> every person designing and operating them and storing the waste never makes a single mistake

Even within Chernobyl Disaster, it was a series of mistakes which led to the full scale disaster IIRC so it isn't as if a single mistake

Also Thorium based Nuclear Reactors wouldn't have this issue from what I understand as in the idea of explosions or anything,

> Nuclear plants are great if they actually happen to get built

I get this part but shouldn't this mean that people should be more vocal about support for Nuclear. We are vocal about support for Solar, might as well be vocal about support for Nuclear and Solar both too?

by Imustaskforhelp

3/10/2026 at 7:30:45 AM

Because nuclear is too good to be true, which makes it the preferred ragebait for many, it seems

by garbagewoman

3/9/2026 at 2:00:28 PM

What’s wrong with nuclear energy?

by catlifeonmars

3/9/2026 at 4:33:54 PM

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.

by brohee

3/10/2026 at 2:18:30 AM

>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.

by glenstein

3/10/2026 at 3:15:23 AM

I don’t believe this is true of modern thorium reactors.

by sh34r

3/10/2026 at 1:32:18 PM

I’m very optimistic on the future of small modular thorium reactors

by catlifeonmars

3/10/2026 at 12:31:40 AM

The cost competitiveness and societal issues make sense (though I suspect some of the cost is being externalized in terms of materials extraction and manufacturing).

I don’t understand what you mean by “no learning curve”. Do you mean that the learning curve is particularly steep for plant operators?

by catlifeonmars

3/11/2026 at 1:57:23 PM

Sorry, the manufacturing learning curve. The most widgets you make, the cheapest they get. The effect was absolutely stunning for batteries and solar panels (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/price-of-lithium-ion-batt...).

We make too few nuclear power plants for them to have a noticeable learning curve, and recently each subsequent one ends up more expensive than the latest, notably because of safety regulation. Korea and I think China had the best success in that regard (and France in the 80s) by being able to make real series, but you don't really see those now except maybe China.

More here: https://ourworldindata.org/learning-curve

by brohee

3/9/2026 at 3:03:42 PM

Its really, really, really expensive to build.

And people are (mostly irrationally) terrified of it, which matters in democracies.

by disgruntledphd2

3/10/2026 at 12:55:43 AM

It’s super expensive and it takes forever to build—so much so that fossil fuel companies fund “libertarian” voices to use it as an attack on environmentalists because nuclear means decades of unabated fossil fuel sales. If you commit to solar or wind, you start cutting into their business within as little as months.

by acdha

3/9/2026 at 1:21:23 PM

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

by s_dev

3/10/2026 at 5:45:13 AM

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%

by p0w3n3d

3/9/2026 at 1:37:02 PM

The goal of net energy exporter assumes that energy produced at one time can be exchange for energy produced at an other time for the same price, and that assumption has not been true in Europe for decades. You can be a net energy exporter and still be dependent energy imports for more than 50% of the energy a country consumes, as has been demonstrated by Denmark.

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.

by belorn

3/9/2026 at 10:42:24 PM

Coal is essentially obsolete for energy generation. It's the most expensive and least flexible option. Even sticking with fossil fuels, natural gas is much better. It sticks around because many plants exist already, but new ones don't make sense.

by SchemaLoad

3/9/2026 at 1:17:32 PM

Europe is a gigantic manufacturer of vast quantities of goods. It has not deindustrialised at all.

by rowanajmarshall

3/9/2026 at 12:16:29 PM

It's more nuanced than that. This article is about the US (a worse polluter than Ireland), but it shows only about a small difference because of offshoring emissions: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/no-the-us-didnt-outsource-our-...

by rwmj

3/9/2026 at 1:11:22 PM

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.

by petcat

3/9/2026 at 5:14:08 PM

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.

by zahlman

3/9/2026 at 1:08:39 PM

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

by mrits

3/10/2026 at 1:33:39 AM

True.

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.

by NoLinkToMe

3/9/2026 at 9:27:20 PM

Great example of allowing perfect to be the enemy of good.

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.

by PaulRobinson

3/9/2026 at 9:47:50 PM

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.

by munk-a

3/9/2026 at 5:18:02 PM

That's true to an extent, but it also sets a bar that almost no country could meet in a globalized economy

by interludead

3/9/2026 at 12:33:22 PM

Steel is the tough one - the vast majority of new steel is produced using blast furnaces and coke. DRI is still a fringe product.

I mean, the UK proudly trumpets that they're coal-free, while entertaining a new coking coal mine.

by madaxe_again

3/9/2026 at 12:48:07 PM

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

by api

3/9/2026 at 1:04:13 PM

Putting numbers on that (for the us) from 2022 [1]:

Electric power—469.9 MMst—91.7%

Industrial total—41.9 MMst—8.2%

    Industrial coke plants—16.0 MMst—3.1%
    Industrial combined heat and power—10.1 MMst—2.0%
    Other industrial—15.8 MMst—3.1%

Commercial—0.8 MMst—0.2%

Getting down to 6% of our current coal use would be amazing. So much lung cancer and asthma would be prevented.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/coal/use-of-coal.php

by dgacmu

3/10/2026 at 10:45:22 AM

Replacing all coal for electricity and leaving industry alone would be a gigantic dent in carbon emissions. Just that.

Even if some of that replacement is with gas it still helps. Gas emits about half the carbon per kWh.

by api

3/9/2026 at 1:47:24 PM

[flagged]

by jqpabc123

3/9/2026 at 1:08:01 PM

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. China even offers greenwashing as a service, so people can buy for green notes a green consciousness.

by 21asdffdsa12

3/9/2026 at 1:59:05 PM

> 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...

by myrmidon

3/9/2026 at 2:21:04 PM

This is what matters. The whole thing is an exercise in greenwashing. It doesn't matter if you stop burning coal in your own country, if the energy you import is also made by burning oil and gas.

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.

by deanc

3/9/2026 at 11:48:21 AM

Great to see, hopefully they can end turf burning too. (For those unaware it's basically where you take a wetland habitat that's also an amazing carbon store, cut it in to chunks, dry it out, and burn it for a very dirty heat source)

by CalRobert

3/9/2026 at 2:26:43 PM

It will virtually end when it is no longer economically advantageous. In my mother's hometown in Mayo, most home heat was solid fuel, and it's gradually turning to electric heat pumps. The other alternative, heating oil, is very expensive and not renewable, but also used a lot. I think the turf is starting to run out because the use of it has gone way down. Either that or fewer homes have a legacy parcel of bog.

by projektfu

3/9/2026 at 11:50:21 AM

I don't think turf (peat) has been burned for energy generation since 2023.

by rithdmc

3/9/2026 at 11:56:35 AM

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

by CalRobert

3/9/2026 at 12:12:34 PM

Unfortunately I think that's going to be very, very hard to sell to many people here in rural Ireland (Roscommon in my case). I would really love to see people stop burning turf but it's such a strong cultural thing that in some parts you'd be ostracised for even thinking the thought.

I've personally spoken to people (who are otherwise quite environmentally aware) who suggest they'd never vote for the Green Party because they'd take their turf away. It's a tough sell.

by redfloatplane

3/9/2026 at 1:31:26 PM

I think they should be allowed for cultural reasons but only if cut by hand like we did when I was a kid :)

by jahnu

3/9/2026 at 3:05:12 PM

> I think they should be allowed for cultural reasons but only if cut by hand like we did when I was a kid :)

Me too! That was a lot of work, and surprisingly hard to stack.

by disgruntledphd2

3/9/2026 at 3:26:58 PM

And turning it would cut your fingers to shreds! But it was great if the weather was fine.

by jahnu

3/9/2026 at 7:18:55 PM

Thank you both for the imagery here - quite beautiful, in its way.

This has made me remember having to go out to the coal shed and fill up a brass bucket and then come back in all covered in coal dust.

I've not thought about That Smell in years!

by detritus

3/9/2026 at 7:58:27 PM

Did you have one of those ubiquitous brass boxes beside the hearth?

by jahnu

3/11/2026 at 6:57:42 PM

No, we had some antique brass bucket thing that I'd invariably have to drag in, accompanied by complaints that I was doing so, because obviously I'd put way too much in, so I didn't have to go out later to get more...

by detritus

3/9/2026 at 5:01:05 PM

Which it almost never was :/

by disgruntledphd2

3/9/2026 at 3:15:14 PM

How much impact does it realistically have on climate change? I would expect it to be relatively small compared to things like owning a car?

In a perfect world we would want to reduce emissions as much as possible in every facet of life, but in the real world I think we should pick battles that have the biggest impact.

by invalidusernam3

3/10/2026 at 5:29:36 AM

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

by asdff

3/10/2026 at 11:56:26 AM

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)

by mrspuratic

3/10/2026 at 7:52:27 PM

It grows back right?

by asdff

3/9/2026 at 12:15:18 PM

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.

by rithdmc

3/9/2026 at 12:25:54 PM

People heating their homes can be very sigificant. In the UK ~15% of all its territorial GHGs come from heating with gas: actual CO2 from the home boiler flues.

CO2 from small amounts of rural home heating is probably not the big thing to be worried about, especially if local recent biomass, eg wood from forest management. But there are still nasties (PMs, biodiversity losses, etc) to be considered and that should be dealt with in due course.

by DamonHD

3/9/2026 at 12:58:46 PM

The actual quantity of people burning turf for home heat is tiny, though.

by rithdmc

3/9/2026 at 12:40:35 PM

At least in 2004 (not sure if it's still the case) there are some homes which still burned coal for heat. That is the nastiest smell out there.

by cogman10

3/9/2026 at 7:24:35 PM

In England it is no longer legal to sell "traditional house" coal for domestic heating:

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/selling-coal-for-domestic-use-in...

by DamonHD

3/9/2026 at 3:10:01 PM

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.

by Zigurd

3/10/2026 at 3:50:29 AM

Not sure what we are supposed to infer from your last sentence?

by dalyons

3/9/2026 at 12:15:04 PM

Your username made me chuckle!

by redfloatplane

3/9/2026 at 12:17:21 PM

;) thanks.

by rithdmc

3/9/2026 at 12:32:36 PM

very funny

by mohatmogeansai

3/9/2026 at 5:20:21 PM

Peat is probably the worst fuel from a carbon perspective

by interludead

3/9/2026 at 5:41:55 PM

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

by quotemstr

3/9/2026 at 5:59:13 PM

they should use that turf for insulation instead

by liveoneggs

3/9/2026 at 12:20:04 PM

Can't beat a good turf fire though!

by secondcoming

3/9/2026 at 2:27:13 PM

It's the best-smelling fire.

by projektfu

3/9/2026 at 1:09:48 PM

damn right

by johnflan

3/9/2026 at 12:23:32 PM

If you use Renewable Energy Sources, it may happen there will be no wind or no sun. So you need some auxiliary source of energy. If you want it at hand, this must be something with fast cold start. So black/brown coal power plan will not help you, similarly nuclear. You need to burn either gas or "biomass", that is wood/turf, etc. Those power plants have about 1h cold start.

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.

by piokoch

3/9/2026 at 12:57:06 PM

> 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?

by stephen_g

3/9/2026 at 1:06:51 PM

Did he state it like it's a surprise? Not like there's anything wrong with bringing up this fact.

by copper4eva

3/9/2026 at 1:16:47 PM

Yet somehow we don't need a similar reminder for the possibility of fossil fuel power plants running out of fuel after a short time if not regularly restocked. Why is it worth bringing up one, but not the other?

by Timon3

3/9/2026 at 1:35:59 PM

> 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.

by triceratops

3/9/2026 at 5:33:05 PM

Battery storage that works at grid-scale is a fairly recent technological innovation. It's good that humanity figured out this technological innovation, and demand for better battery technology from the smartphone and electric car revolutions had a lot to do with it. But battery storage is still expensive and relatively-new physical infrastructure that takes time and expense to deploy at scale, and it's still in the process of happening now.

by JuniperMesos

3/9/2026 at 12:36:15 PM

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.

by madaxe_again

3/9/2026 at 12:46:02 PM

> Pumped storage hydro

It's a pipedream. Yes it's cheap and efficient, but it requires the geography and the will to destroy a local ecosystem.

BESS is what will ultimately win. It's pretty energy dense and it can be deployed on pretty much any junk land location. The only fight you'll have is with the neighbors who don't like it.

My power company, Idaho power, is deploying a 200MWh BESS on a slice of land they've owned for decades near one of their substations. The hardest part has been the permitting (which is now done).

by cogman10

3/9/2026 at 12:50:02 PM

Cheap as in "requires proper location and the destruction of ecology on large scale" cheap?

Edit:

https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/features/energy-storage-ana...

To cover Europe's need you only need to build 70 1.5 GW hydroelectric stations at a cost of $92 billion (in reality much higher) while greatly damaging ecology in large areas.

(The link has rather detailed info)

by troupo

3/9/2026 at 4:29:05 PM

This source also offers an option of $1 Trillion USD to do it with battery storage.

All of Europe. $1 Trillion USD. Oh, and that figure has already fallen by 1/3rd in reality and the article claims it should drop by half again.

And that seems to be assuming you only have wind power as input. The long lull periods that drive the high storage requirements are, as that article claims, caused by large high pressure air masses. High pressure systems like that often come with clear skies! Indeed, go look at weather history for that same 2015 period and you see that the skies were calm and clear, and precipitation was about half the "normal" amount for that time of year. While there is perfect correlation between a windless day and a night without sunlight, battery to get you through the night is trivial and solved far more cheaply than this article seems to understand. Enough battery to maintain 24 hour output for a solar farm is cheap enough to compete with fossil fuels. Long term, wind and solar do not correlate, so it's very rare to have long lulls in both at the same time.

So this article is leaving out important details and also is way more pessimistic than even it admits is true.

That also ignores that even in the "lulls", wind never seems to go to zero, so even in lulls, you can always just have more wind. Building 10x as much wind as you need is not as feasible as building 10x as much solar as you need though IMO.

Oh, and a very very very important fact: Renewable generation is almost entirely a one time cost, or one time every 30ish years on average. OPEX per kilowatt hour is dramatically lower than fossil fuels. In fact, today Europe imports 10 million barrels of crude oil a day, and at $100 a barrel (a number which will rise quite a bit in the coming months), Europe spends $1 Trillion every few years.

Europe's current energy spend is to buy an entire continent's worth of energy storage and just turn it into CO2 every few years. Every single day of crude oil import, Europe could instead pay for one of the Coire Glas model plants this article is doing the math with.

Storage is beyond feasible and will reduce energy costs.

Note: This article is about making wind energy constant over month long time scales, not about building enough storage to power Europe durably, so that explains some of it's misses, but also doesn't really explain much. The 2.1 TWh of storage it suggest would be enough to power all of Europe for 8 hours a day.

by mrguyorama

3/9/2026 at 1:31:22 PM

> 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?

by crote

3/9/2026 at 12:30:41 PM

> 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.

by troupo

3/9/2026 at 1:28:45 PM

5% per minute is not extremely fast. Simple cycle gas turbine (peaker) plants routinely go 0 to 100% in less than 10 minutes. Nuclear plants can only hit 5% per minute in the 50 to 100% interval (per your own source).

And all of this is confused by the way the nuclear industry uses the term "load following". You'd think it means "changing the power output from moment to moment to match electricity demand" but for nuclear plants it means "changing from one pre-planned constant level to another pre-planned constant level, up to four times per day".[0] There are only three[1] sources of electricity that can be ramped freely enough to exactly match demand: hydro, simple-cycle gas turbines and batteries. All electrical supplies will need some of those three mixed in. Which is why France is still 10% hydro and 10% natural gas in their electricity supply.

0: Some of the most modern Russian plants can move to +-20% of their current target at 10% per minute, but "the number of such very fast power variations is limited, and they are mainly reserved for emergency situations." per your source.

1: OK, there are some obsolete ways too, like diesel generators. At least obsolete at the scale of the electricity grid.

by sehansen

3/9/2026 at 5:51:04 PM

> 5% per minute is not extremely fast.

5% of nameplate capacity.

> You'd think it means "changing the power output from moment to moment to match electricity demand" but for nuclear plants it means "changing from one pre-planned constant level to another pre-planned constant level, up to four times per day"

Which is clearly invalidated by the very source I provided, and which you then somehow quote back at me.

> "the number of such very fast power variations is limited, and they are mainly reserved for emergency situations." per your source.

Imagine if you didn't omit the full quote/context:

--- start quote ---

Also, AES-2006 is capable of fast power modulations with ramps of up to 5% Pr per second (in the interval of ±10% Pr), or power drops of 20% Pr per minute in the interval of 50-100% of the rated power. However, the number of such very fast power variations is limited, and they are mainly reserved for emergency situations.

--- end quote ---

Oh look. What's limited is an actual emergency ramp up of 5% per second or power drops of 20% per minute.

Which is literally an emergency that is not needed in a power grid.

by troupo

3/10/2026 at 9:21:42 AM

Gas turbines do 16% of nameplate capacity per minute without catching a sweat. 5% per minute isn't particularly extreme.

---

Let me quote page 10 of your source "In brief, most of the modern light water nuclear reactors are capable (by design) to operate in a load following mode, i.e. to change their power level once or twice per day in the range of 100% to 50% (or even lower) of the rated power, with a ramp rate of up to 5% (or even more) of rated power per minute". Your own source defines "load following" as changing the targeted power level once or twice per day.

Again on page 14 (about how the French currently run their nuclear plants): "The nuclear power plants operating in the load following mode follow a variable load programme with one or two power changes per period of 24 h". Weirdly enough this is contradicted by table 2.1 on page 20 where they do four changes per day.

---

> Oh look. What's limited is an actual emergency ramp up of 5% per second or power drops of 20% per minute.

If you look at table 2.4 on the same page it states that it (the Russian VVER-1200) can do the 5% per second/20% per minute emergency change 20 000 times over the lifetime of the reactor. The 10% per minute change can also only be done 20 000 times over the lifetime of the reactor. Table 2.2 on page 21 helpfully calculates that 15 000 cycles is once per day for 40 years, so the VVER-1200 only can do a bit more than one >5% change per day (outside of emergencies) assuming a similar 40 year lifespan. And that was the point of my footnote: that nuclear plants technically can go faster than 5% but not up and down on a minute-by-minute basis.

by sehansen

3/10/2026 at 5:28:11 PM

> Gas turbines do 16% of nameplate capacity per minute without catching a sweat. 5% per minute isn't particularly extreme.

If you keep jumping around with your arguments, nothing is extreme.

Your original claim started with claiming cold starts (which most power plants including gas turbines don't do, ever) and that coal and nuclear aren't fast.

Nuclear is plenty fast.

I never claimed gas power stations were slow, or that they were slower than nuclear.

> If you look at table 2.4 on the same page it states that it (the Russian VVER-1200) can do the 5% per second/20% per minute emergency change

Let me slowly walk you through that statement:

--- start quote ---

can do the 5% per second/20% per minute emergency change

emergency change

emergency

--- end quote ---

> And that was the point of my footnote: that nuclear plants technically can go faster than 5% but not up and down on a minute-by-minute basis.

No idea what your footnote was about, and how it is relevant.

by troupo

3/9/2026 at 1:04:56 PM

For the foreseeable future, building enough nuclear for peak capacity is exceedingly expensive.

> None of the power plants ever do a "fast cold start"

Somewhere in each grid you will have “black start” capacity contracts, dunno if nuclear can fills this role (or if grids exclude nukes for one reason or another).

Plenty of peaker plants built with the intention of running double digit hours per year and therefore the tradeoff supports being largely “off” in between those calls. Batteries might fill that gap.

by Scoundreller

3/9/2026 at 1:22:32 PM

> 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 (swinging between 60% and 100% once a day) and barely touches on the economic effects. The situation is going to look drastically different for a renewables-first grid, where additional sources are needed for at most a few hours a day, for a few months per year.

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

Gas turbines can. Hydro can. Battery storage can.

by crote

3/9/2026 at 4:05:50 PM

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 going to need X capacity 24x7 and build nuclear, you simply build enough to provide just that plus perhaps a few extra for redundancy when another one goes offline. Then use gas peakers for the "oh shit" days difference between what nuclear is providing and solar was expected to but could not.

I don't understand the fascination folks have about nuclear not being able to following the grid. They don't need to, since they only ever remotely make sense when operated 24x7 at 100%. If you always have 1TW of grid usage every night during your lowest usage period - build that much nuclear as your starting point and figure out the rest from there. Nuclear's share of the total mix should be a straight line on a graph outside of plant shutdowns for maintenance.

by phil21

3/10/2026 at 3:59:05 AM

That’s not the way the energy market works though. The cheapest sources (like daytime solar) will knock your expensive nuclear off the grid. Or force it to sell at significantly below operating cost, which is suicidal in the long term, since nukes need a guaranteed high price nearly 100% of the time to pencil out (pay back the capex).

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.

by dalyons

3/10/2026 at 4:30:56 PM

> Which is why nukes don’t get built.

Nukes don't get built because:

- billions (if not trillions) of subsidies were poured into wind and solar over decades to make them viable while nuclear energy was addled with additional taxes, reactor closures, and very few new reactor licenses

- decades of fear-mongering led to loss of expertise in building new nuclear power plants (and instead South-East Asia has been picking up speed in building new reactors) [1]

In 2015 nuclear was significantly cheaper than most other types of energy across most markets: https://world-nuclear.org/images/articles/REPORT_Economics_R... (Figure 12, in some markets including the then-emerging renewables). And yet renewables were enjoying unprecedented amounts of subsidies and money poured into them while nuclear... Oh we know what was happening to nuclear, just look at Germany.

[1] Here's EU's own report: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=COM:2025...

Renewables: 80-80 billion euro in subsidies a year.

Fossil fuels: 60-140 billion euro in subsidies a year.

Nuclear: good luck finding the thin orange line in the graph. (1% of subsidies)

--- start quote ---

As shown on Figure 4 , solar energy received by far the largest share of subsidies, both historically and in 2023 (EUR 21 bn), followed by biomass (EUR 9 bn) and wind power (EUR 7 bn). Hydropower received marginal financial support (~EUR 1 bn), while subsidies targeting multiple renewable technologies (such as tax reductions on green technology or public aid for investment projects) jumped to EUR 23 bn by 2023.

Subsidies for nuclear energy dropped from EUR 7.9 bn in 2021 to 3.7 bn in 2022 and 4.1 bn in 2023. Of the 14 MS providing nuclear subsidies, France (EUR 2.9 bn) accounted for the biggest share, followed by Germany (EUR 0.8 bn) , Spain and Belgium (EUR 0.1 bn each).

--- end quote ---

by troupo

3/10/2026 at 4:33:39 PM

Also corruption. I lived in an area that for some years was trying to build a new nuclear power plant.

It was fraud from the top down and the manufacturer went bankrupt. I paid more for power in SC than I ever did when I lived in “summer all year” Florida. But I guess I got a token check in the mail some years later.

Plant got completely abandoned and I got to help subsidize this failure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nukegate_scandal

by YCpedohaven

3/10/2026 at 5:20:50 PM

Oh yes. That too. It's one problem after another in quite a few countries: ignore/neglect, make processes, regulations and subsidies opaque, all of this leads to huge construction times and corruption, declare nuclear non-viable.

China: "Nearly every Chinese nuclear project that has entered service since 2010 has achieved construction in 7 years or less." [1] Building over 40 reactors since 2005

[1] https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/chinas-impressive-...

by troupo

3/12/2026 at 6:14:35 PM

And still china’s share of energy provided by nuclear is declining y/y, and will continue to decline for the foreseeable future. Because their renewables buildout is >10x nuclear.

Even china, a nuclear construction scale/cost/time success story, can’t make them compete with renewables.

by dalyons

3/12/2026 at 6:40:48 PM

Share of the total grid is meaningless comparing solar to nuclear. It’s the wrong metric to optimize for - the metric that actually matters and is the expensive one is reliability.

What matters is “share of the grid when solar literally cannot provide the power at any price”.

In a well designed and functional grid share of nuclear power should be close to 100% of the latter and the lowest percentage of the former you can get away with.

It’s better to think of nuclear as energy storage with a really really long lasting battery that costs the same to run it 24/7 or 1 hour a month.

Ideally it would be replacing close to all baseload/reliable power on the grid outside of hydro - with hydro being your peakers instead of natural gas for topologies amenable to it. The power share graph should look like nuclear at close to 100% at night less wind and battery storage that backs wind unreliability - and that graph remaining flat throughout the peak daytime hours with other energy sources kicking in such as solar, hydro, duck curve sized battery arrays, etc.

by phil21

3/12/2026 at 10:58:16 PM

No one pays you for that reliability though. In free energy markets they pay you for what you supply, at the clearing price at that moment.

Solar is so cheap it will push nukes off the grid during the day, you don’t get credit just because it’s more reliable. People will just build more and more solar till the nukes share in the day is zero. And at night people are incentivized to build more wind and batteries, because you can still undercut the expensive nuke power and push it off. When the wind doesn’t blow at night there’s gas and hydro peakers. And more and more batteries. There’s increasingly no room left for nukes that have to be sold at 100% for 100% of the time to still be the most expensive form of energy.

The only way nukes have a role at scale today is if you have state intervention in the market to force the grid to buy your nuke power at close to 100% at the baseline share you described, because you have a nation-state goal of reliability that you prioritize higher than cost. Essentially subsidizing the nukes. And I’m sympathetic to that goal, but that’s not mostly not what western markets do, and not what they will do. Making power deliberately more expensive is unpopular, and not neoliberal marketism

by dalyons

3/9/2026 at 5:47:36 PM

> The obvious counterexample is Chernobyl,

You mean the obsolete design that is not used even in old reactors, not to say of modern designs?

Quote:

--- start quote ---

The minimum requirements for the manoeuvrability capabilities of modern reactors are defined by the utilities requirements that are based on the requirements of the grid operators. For example, according to the current version of the European Utilities Requirements (EUR) the NPP must at least be capable of daily load cycling operation between 50% and 100 % of its rated power Pr, with a rate of change of electric output of 3-5% of Pr per minute.

--- end quote ---

> The situation is going to look drastically different for a renewables-first grid, where additional sources are needed for at most a few hours a day, for a few months per year.

Ah, to live in these mythical times...

by troupo

3/9/2026 at 1:02:04 PM

Irish man here - Over the last few years, we've graduated from providing cheap energy to now importing most of our energy. We've seen huge energy price increases as a result. We're seeing more and more cost-of-living protests, the war now means more will suffer with fuel prices and we're still going ahead with closing down energy suppliers (this is a 2025 article but the point still stands).

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.

by cauliflower99

3/9/2026 at 2:52:11 PM

The actual causes of electricity cost rises in Ireland being higher than Europe are:

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...

by ZeroGravitas

3/9/2026 at 3:34:23 PM

> 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.

by FrojoS

3/9/2026 at 4:00:35 PM

> It seems logical that ending the use of existing coal energy infrastructure puts upward pressure on prices

Only if you externalize environmental costs. The point is that coal is actually really expensive. The only real argument is how fast the implicit subsidy on these externalized costs should be removed. The world has had decades to slowly remove these subsidies and failed to do so. The impacts caused by these externalized factors are starting to stack up and so should the prices.

by jmward01

3/9/2026 at 3:51:04 PM

> Coal is cheap, abundant, energy dense.

Coal is neither cheap nor abundant in Ireland.

by bryanlarsen

3/9/2026 at 5:07:42 PM

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.

by reillyse

3/9/2026 at 8:25:12 PM

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.

by hunterpayne

3/9/2026 at 8:47:12 PM

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.

by bryanlarsen

3/9/2026 at 9:02:58 PM

No, that's wishful thinking. You can have your own opinion, but not your own facts. Engineers actually calculate all this stuff. EROEI for instance means Energy Returned on Energy Invested. For renewables, its 4. That means under ideal conditions (albino of 1, 20 year lifetime), over the lifetime of the panel you get back 4x the energy that it took to extract the materials, make the panels and install them. So if you site the panel somewhere with an albino of .25 (Spain) you get about as much power out of them as they took to make and install. And that obviously doesn't actually help with AGW.

by hunterpayne

3/9/2026 at 9:14:40 PM

An of EROI of 4 would probably already include the poor sunlight conditions of Ireland or would be some old numbers based off old solar technology. Plus there's contention around EROI because it does ignore the fact that renewables can be recycled and many are used past their lifetimes, and of course it ignores the negative externalities of spewing the one time use fossil fuels into the atmosphere. There are plenty of studies and papers arguing over EROI and its veracity.

by gusgus01

3/10/2026 at 10:04:30 AM

The ERoEI numbers seem to be under some dispute. This study estimates it at 9-10 in Switzerland.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...

Also you mention albino and I can't find what that would mean in this context. At first I assumed you meant albedo but that doesn't seem to contextually match either. So I might just be misunderstanding your post.

by tdb7893

3/9/2026 at 9:30:59 PM

A quick Google shows EREOI of solar panels at 10-30 depending on study.

by bryanlarsen

3/9/2026 at 10:06:07 PM

The PV manufacturers themselves say its 4. Those studies you mention say you could make them at 10-30 in theory if you could somehow purify the poli-silica differently. If we made PVs in the west with natural gas (and carbon recapture), perhaps it could get to that number (but perhaps not). However, PVs aren't made in the west and the poli-silica isn't purified with gas but instead using coal. That's why those numbers are different. And for reference, we could have made those PVs in the west, however politicians chose not to.

by hunterpayne

3/10/2026 at 12:59:40 PM

> The PV manufacturers themselves say its 4.

You've not cited anything for this so far as I can see, but this claim is obviously false.

Reason being, the entire system in my driveway will have paid for itself in one year, including delivery cost and inverter and the aluminium stand it's mounted on (the small bit of aluminium in the stand is the most energy intensive part of the whole kit), and the weakest part of that system still has a lifespan of 25-40 years, and even that as a % reduction in output from peak not as a hard cut-off.

Even if 100% of the cost was energy, even with the 5x price differential between where I am (Domestic Germany) and where they were made (Industrial China, where the low energy cost is… ah… due to renewables, because coal's really expensive :P), it's obviously not an ERoEI of 4 even on the low end of that lifespan.

Given all that and doing the maths, what I will need to replace and when (or rather, kids whose mother I have yet to meet will need to replace when I'm in a retirement home), the ERoEI is at a minimum 14 even if 100% of the cost of replacement panels is energy.

The cost is almost certainly less than 100% energy. Every step of the industrial process wants its own profit margin.

by ben_w

3/10/2026 at 10:00:28 AM

I think you don't know what you're talking about.

For one the EROEI isn't 4 for renewables under ideal conditions, it differs wildly depending on the type and location and installation. It's true that for solar in Ireland (which are NOT ideal conditions) its on the low end, though still about twice as much as 4, and it's certainly not the case for wind which can have them as high as 20.

Second, I've got no clue what 'albino' is. Do you mean albedo? In that case, it's completely irrelevant for wind power. Ireland produces 20x more wind than solar, the latter is completely irrelevant in Ireland.

For solar albedo is relevant, but only if you have bifacial panels, which are still the minority.

In Spain albedo is relatively low but it has some of the highest direct sunshine hours in Europe. Albedo is high in places like the Nordics, which have fewer sunshine hours. In other words, EV is brilliant in Spain due to the abundant sun, yet surprisingly is still viable in a place like Norway precisely because of relatively high albedo, not in spite of it. This is why EROEI for solar in Spain can get up to 20. The idea that you get as much power as it took to make (EROEI of 1) is so wrong, and so obviously wrong, that it seems like you just don't have any idea what you're talking about.

by NoLinkToMe

3/9/2026 at 8:38:27 PM

How close are Ireland to 100% wind during optimal weather?

by belorn

3/9/2026 at 8:55:11 PM

In 2023, peak renewable generation capacity was 75% of typical energy demand:

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...

by Macha

3/9/2026 at 11:21:02 PM

With 75% in 2023, it means there are still headroom for expansion without hurting the economics too much of existing wind farms. Denmark had a very clear growth of wind farms up to about 100% of demand during optimal weather, and then a very clear stop in growth afterward. On average it still only produce about half the energy consumed in Denmark, so over time I do not expect to see Ireland to go much higher than 50%. It might get a slight advantage given the improved wind farm technology to utilize low wind conditions.

I do see in the political goals for Ireland that they, like Germany and many other countries in EU, are relying on the idea to turn wind into green hydrogen once they hit that 100% during optimal weather. Peoples faith in that strategy has gone down significant in the last 5-10 years.

by belorn

3/9/2026 at 8:27:34 PM

What does the renewables supply chain look like? Do you build the systems right there in Ireland? Panels? Batteries? How does that money stay in Ireland?

by hihitsdumb

3/9/2026 at 5:37:22 PM

does this renewable policy of wind farms etc also extend to the rain forest being cut down for balsawood? or the landfilles the massive chunks of fiberglass coated wings then get put into?

I guess we need a new planet when we're done filling it with junk and have depleted all the rain forest etc

by redeeman

3/9/2026 at 6:21:43 PM

Like fossil fuels are somehow ecologically clean and don't cause massive deforestation themselves? Sure, renewables aren't a silver bullet and there's a real conversation to be had about proper disposal of turbine blades and PV cells, but it's pretty convenient how that same scrutiny never seems to get applied to fossil fuels.

by sensanaty

3/9/2026 at 8:37:08 PM

That's because the EROEI of FF are in the 100s. The EROEI of renewables is 4. I'm sorry that the laws of physics are inconvenient to your politics but they don't care about your politics (or mine).

If you want solar PV to help with AGW, they must be sited somewhere with an solar albino > .25. That's about Barcelona in Europe and SF in the US. If you put solar PV somewhere with less sun, you are actually making AGW worse.

by hunterpayne

3/9/2026 at 10:42:42 PM

Now this is just moving goalposts. The comment I replied to stated that the problem with renewables was that they too pollute and cause waste that isn't easy to dispose of, and they also affect the environment in a negative light. I didn't even dispute that point, as I said renewables aren't a silver bullet and we should be pursuing as much variety as we can with our energy production & grids, whether it be fossil fuels, renewables or especially nuclear. But we should preferably be moving more towards the latter two and away from fossil fuels except in situations where they make the most sense, and also considering all the facts that usually get conveniently ignored when discussing fossil fuels, like their disastrous effects on the environment.

> The EROEI of renewables is 4

Saying "renewables" have an EROEI of 4 is disingenuous at best. "Renewables" isn't one technology, it covers everything from wind to solar to geothermal to hydro. That 4 figure comes from worst-case transitional modelling of buffered wind specifically, and even then it's a temporary system-wide dip, not a measurement of what these technologies actually deliver[1]. Wind and solar individually come in at >=10:1 and rising as the tech matures[2]. Geothermal actually is in the hundreds, but that obviously isn't globally applicable. Lumping all of that together and slapping a "4" on it is either ignorant or deliberately misleading.

And the "hundreds" figure for fossil fuels is pure fantasy. Conventional oil sits at roughly 18-43:1, and US fossil fuel discovery EROI has cratered from ~1000:1 in 1919 to about 5:1 in the 2010s[3]. A paper in Nature Energy last year took it further and showed that when you measure EROI at the useful energy stage - accounting for all the waste heat from combustion - fossil fuels drop to about 3.5:1, while wind and solar beat the equivalent threshold even with intermittency factored in[4]. So "the laws of physics" are actually making a pretty strong case for renewables here.

> If you want solar PV to help with AGW, they must be sited somewhere with an solar albino > .25

I think you mean albedo. And that claim has been tested[5], a satellite study of 352 solar sites found the actual albedo reduction was much smaller than what's typically assumed, and the warming effect was offset by avoided emissions within roughly a year at most sites. A separate study of 116 solar farms found a net cooling effect on land surface temperature[6]. The idea that solar north of Barcelona is "making AGW worse" just doesn't survive contact with the data.

> ...but they don't care about your politics (or mine)

What a deeply unserious tone to take in a discussion like this. Where in my comment did I mention politics of any kind? Is any mention of renewables in a positive light political to you, or is it where I questioned whether the same scrutiny gets applied to fossil fuels? Because that's not politics, that is just reality which you seem to care so much about.

Newsflash, you don't need to be a leftist (which is what I assume you're insinuating) to realize that relying solely on a very finite, heavily polluting fuel source that has already caused disastrous effects to the Earth is maybe not the smartest long-term play. That's not politics, that's just common sense and basic risk management. Not to mention the decades of propaganda, lies, bribery and other bullshittery that big oil has wrought upon us. You'd think people who call themselves true conservatives and free-market capitalists would be the first ones evangelizing against all of that, but apparently not.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09218...

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09218...

[3] https://westernresourceadvocates.org/publications/assessment... and also just the wikipedia page on the ROI of various energy sources

[4] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-024-01518-6

[5] https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01619-w

[6] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0038092X2...

by sensanaty

3/9/2026 at 6:53:51 PM

What is the balsawood comment in reference to? I’ve never heard that mentioned in conversation around renewables but it’s not my area of expertise.

by lovich

3/9/2026 at 8:05:34 PM

I didn't know about balsa wood in Wind Turbines either until this thread - looked it up and found that it's being replaced with PET foam because of the problems caused by deforestation (etc)

https://www.usitc.gov/publications/332/executive_briefings/e...

by awesome_dude

3/9/2026 at 7:39:09 PM

Is your point that coal mining, transport, and usage have no negative externalities?

by skywhopper

3/9/2026 at 9:17:01 PM

90% of the coal that was being used comes from Colombia, thats not really even that far guys and I'm sure it's mined under the most stringent environmental controls.

by reillyse

3/9/2026 at 8:07:03 PM

Ah yes, the Landman argument.

https://youtu.be/wBC_bug5DIQ?si=rfKryFd9fgJ1Gw0h

by kkkqkqkqkqlqlql

3/9/2026 at 6:17:31 PM

Coal is cheap and abundant in the English Midlands, which explains much of the industrial revolution starting there.

Said collieries, which if put back into service, would be able to cheaply get coal to Ireland via barge at no great cost or latency.

by linksnapzz

3/9/2026 at 6:23:04 PM

The UK's deep mines would be spectacularly uneconomic. Some have been sealed permanently (for expensive values of permanent) and the supporting knowledge and infrastructure would have to be rebuilt.

Coal makes as much sense as a modern fuel as horse drawn buses do for transport.

by TheOtherHobbes

3/9/2026 at 8:29:12 PM

...and, oddly enough, coal provides over half of China's electricity supply. I suppose nobody told them about the future, where bauxite reduction can be done w/ wind energy.

by linksnapzz

3/10/2026 at 12:56:43 AM

Oh no somebody told China about the future. That’s why they sell everyone cheap PV panels, and are now building out the equivalent of the entire UKs existing solar and wind capacity every year. Plus they’re getting faster.

In 20 years time China gonna be entirely powered by renewables while we’re still having this silly argument about what the future is going to look like.

by avianlyric

3/10/2026 at 1:03:01 AM

probably more like 15

by bdangubic

3/9/2026 at 7:24:05 PM

Coal was abundant. British coal was mined out. The coal that is left isn’t economical to mine.

by ianburrell

3/9/2026 at 8:27:08 PM

People said the same thing about many gas & oil fields in the Permian Basin back in the '70s.

How'd that work out?

by linksnapzz

3/9/2026 at 4:56:57 PM

Coal also isn’t really energy dense since so much of the energy is wasted when converting to electricity

by baron816

3/9/2026 at 5:16:37 PM

It is still one of the densest sources. It's just not as dense as it naively seems.

by marcosdumay

3/9/2026 at 6:31:26 PM

Rankine cycle efficiency can be up to 45%; monocrystalline solar panels ~25%? I suppose you aren't paying for the sunshine, but if cloudy days affected coal power, James Watt wouldn't be famous.

by linksnapzz

3/9/2026 at 6:51:05 PM

Luckily solar panels work for 30+ years while coal works for only as long as you burn it. You can also recycle solar panels, but try reversing entropy to get your coal back and you’ll see what’s up. Cloudy days are solved by wind, ocean energy, geothermal, storage, etc.

by ok_dad

3/9/2026 at 8:25:18 PM

"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.

by linksnapzz

3/9/2026 at 8:38:25 PM

> 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 the other renewable options he mentioned. Plus a couple natural gas plants for fallback that can comfortably sit idle until needed.

If some combo of renewables are used 90% of the time when possible, no one is going to be mad about modern clean-burning LNG plants compared to a toxic, expensive relic of the past like coal.

Current trends make it clear the future will be renewables, grid battery storage, and however many natural gas plants are needed for reliability based on local climate (plus keeping nuclear online if you already have it). And that “future” is pretty much here already in places like California.

by toraway

3/9/2026 at 8:58:24 PM

I wonder how cheap one would have to make electricity to make up for CA's silly regulatory environment and confiscatory taxes.

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.

by linksnapzz

3/10/2026 at 12:27:45 AM

That’s called moving the goalposts.

No one ever claimed CA would have “so much surplus electricity that USX and Tata are rushing to build steel mills”.

Your “concern” was that there is no non-fantasy means to deal with transient output of solar or other renewables, I showed you how that is being implemented in the real world as we speak to deal with CA’s notorious peak evening load without blackouts. And it will only become more cost effective over time thanks to economies of scale.

CA has just started bringing grid storage online in the last few years but it’s already making an appreciable difference during peak times that in the past years resulted in blackouts.

It shows the clear, achievable path to a renewable + battery (+ nat gas) future that’s 95% renewables and highly resilient. Grid storage isn’t a “10 years away” fantasy like anti-renewable advocates might wish and it’s the critical piece to make those plans possible.

https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook/supply

by toraway

3/11/2026 at 2:52:16 PM

What game are you playing, where the provision of electricity for industrial use isn't a goal?

Again-I have been hearing for 25 years about the infinite potential of solar energy in CA-and yet, even now, you need to play games as to when the cheapest time of day it is to charge your car from your residential address.

by linksnapzz

3/9/2026 at 11:13:16 PM

> there's no significant recycling of solar panels

There will be when it’s needed in a decade or two. Right now solar farms installed recently have years to go until they’re decommissioned. There’s already processes for it.

by ok_dad

3/9/2026 at 11:49:35 PM

There’s no significant recycling of solar panels because they’re still in operation and don’t need to be recycled. Turns out solar panels last decades with only minor degradation so they haven’t needed to be recycled at scale.

They’re almost entirely glass and aluminium anyway. We know how to recycle glass and aluminium.

by teamonkey

3/9/2026 at 7:31:56 PM

If you're going to make that comparison, you need to compare apples-to-apples and include solar efficiency in the coal too. After all coal's energy originally came from the sun. Plants converted the sunlight into energy at an efficiency of about 1%. A miniscule fraction of that energy went into the plant growth, and then a miniscule fraction of that energy was captured when the plant was converted into coal.

by bryanlarsen

3/9/2026 at 5:51:16 PM

> Coal is neither cheap nor abundant in Ireland.

But it is abundant in Russia, Ukraine, Germany, and Poland. Also, there is nuclear power in France.

However, Russia and Ukraine are at war. Germany is willing to go green and destroy itself. EU hates Poland and other east European countries. And EU and the rest of the world can't disassociate nuclear power with weapons.

So I guess EU can enjoy their limited and expensive green energy.

by rs999gti

3/9/2026 at 8:13:33 PM

>Coal is cheap

No it's not. I'm not talking about the environment either, coal plants are just straight-up more expensive than gas plants and renewables.

Coal plants are necessarily steam turbines and not internal combustion, because coal is filthy and the mercury/sulfur/etc would wreck the guts of any machinery it goes through. Thus, it's only used to boil water.

Gas turbines don't have that problem, so they spin the turbine with the combustion products directly. They're far more efficient, the machines are smaller and cheaper, and because you don't need to wait for a giant kettle to boil before ramping up the power, they're far more flexible and responsive to demand. It also helps that the gas is fed with a gas pipe, whereas coal needs to be fed with a bobcat.

Which is why nobody is building new coal plants - they're way more expensive than gas plants, even if the gas fuel itself is more expensive than coal.

by Qwertious

3/9/2026 at 8:28:15 PM

Nobody is building new coal plants...

...except China, who is building coal plants at a pace never seen in history. Are they dumb, or...?

by hihitsdumb

3/9/2026 at 8:42:16 PM

They are replacing old dirty plants. Actual coal burned is not rising anymore.

by tpm

3/9/2026 at 8:54:16 PM

So they are building new coal plants.

by hihitsdumb

3/10/2026 at 2:22:12 AM

Building coal plants doesn't impact emissions (materially, anyway). It's the using them to burn coal part that causes emissions (and generates electricity).

by pcchristie

3/10/2026 at 12:46:01 AM

Yes, many of which are expected to never actually be used. Accidental result of how China does its provence based infra funding.

Right now China is building out more solar and wind per year than than the entire total deployed solar and wind in the entire UK, and they’re only getting fast. Their ability build renewables now vastly outstrips their historical coal buildout and their rising energy demands. They’re well on their way to achieving net zero far faster than anyone thought was possible.

by avianlyric

3/10/2026 at 1:35:33 AM

Chinese state govt is building them in response to poorly thought out federal govt incentives. That plus backup plans (since China had plenty of coal but needs to import gas, so it could easily be navally blockaded by the US). Also gas turbines are a specialty of the West (which again doesn't work well geopolitically), and their demand has massively outstripped supply (we're even seeing jet engines being converted into gas turbines) and the order backlog is years out - all of which doesn't jive with China's "build everything right f'n now" strategy.

China is building everything at a pace never before seen in history. Partly because their construction industry is a jobs program, and their economy is so dependent on it that they prefer building things at a loss rather than not building at all. Which is financially dumb, but welcome to politics.

by Qwertious

3/10/2026 at 4:53:36 AM

Or perhaps they aren't drowning in propaganda (that they themselves promote in the West), and are happily reaping the rewards of cheap coal and energy production.

By the way, the round trip of: Sell and export your coal to manufacturers that burn that coal to produce electronic goods that produce energy, then buy that energy technology to power your own infrastructure, is certainly not cheaper than just burning the coal you mined yourself for your energy production.

Cheaper (ergo, more profitable) for the mining companies, yes. That's about it though.

by ting0

3/9/2026 at 3:42:46 PM

> Most Europe has way too high electricity prices.

Way to high compared to what? Some countries do not even have a problem with prices but with capacity (Netherlands). They would be willing to pay but they do not have the grid to deliver where the thing is needed, and it's hard to build new grids in high density areas.

> It seems logical that ending the use of existing coal energy infrastructure lead to an increase of prises.

But doesn't this depend a lot on planning and investing in alternatives rather the just closing or not the coal? Sure, if you just close one source and leave everything else untouched prices will increase, but doesn't sound like the smartest approach overall...

by vladms

3/9/2026 at 4:52:39 PM

Way to high compared to actual cost. Almost half of fuel and electricity costs in Germany is tax.

by j-krieger

3/9/2026 at 5:42:26 PM

If it's due to tax it can't be used to advocate the pros or cons of market arrangements, since we don't know what the market would be doing in the absence of the tax.

by pocksuppet

3/9/2026 at 7:02:27 PM

It's because of the rules of the European Energy Market where all electricity has to be as expensive as the most expensive source.

So as soon as Germany lights up their gas powerplants, that follow gas prices (wars, etc), French nuclear electricity has to be sold for the same price.

by eloisant

3/9/2026 at 7:29:13 PM

> rules of the European Energy Market where all electricity has to be as expensive as the most expensive source.

aren't all/most electricity market working this way (pricing based on marginal price, aka pay-as-clear)?

pay-as-bid has other potential issues and might not be better.

by tonfa

3/9/2026 at 8:22:05 PM

Yes, but that's assuming that there should be a free electricity market.

The fundamental issue with electricity markets is that they cannot rely on any signal other than the electricity price to control whether a given plant will be running at a given time or not.

I think a real alternative would be to set-up an entity charged with negotiating prices with the electricity producers (which would also be a sort of partial reversal on the whole market thing in a lot of countries).

by dadoum

3/10/2026 at 3:36:49 PM

Not just all electricity markets. All markets. Why would you ever sell something cheaper than you know the buyer is willing to pay?

by pocksuppet

3/9/2026 at 8:22:30 PM

>It's because of the rules of the European Energy Market where all electricity has to be as expensive as the most expensive source.

Are you talking about the marginal cost? Don't blame the govt, blame the economics textbook.

by Qwertious

3/9/2026 at 4:23:20 PM

If you don't count the externalities, sure. Healthcare is a cost too. We need more holistic accounting, the financialising of everything into a tidy but ultimately false P&L column is literally killing us.

by sollewitt

3/9/2026 at 8:04:43 PM

here some comparison chart, 2nd image in the article below:

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/images/th...

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

there are 2-2.5x times differences between highest and lowest, of 25-30 countries

And here is some current/future (??) prices/increases, which i have no idea where they come from:

https://euenergy.live/

by svilen_dobrev

3/9/2026 at 4:29:23 PM

> Coal is cheap, abundant, energy dense.

Nuclear defeats coal in all of these aspects, aside from the high upfront cost.

by linhns

3/9/2026 at 5:03:45 PM

Upfront costs... then running costs (in the UK at least, it has to command a premium over other energy prices, to be profitable)... afterwards costs (in the UK no private company is on the hook for decommissioning their nuclear plants, the population will pick up that cost through taxes)...

But sure, nuclear is cheap if you ignore all those things.

by ljf

3/9/2026 at 5:13:24 PM

We're already ignoring them all for coal plants, why not?

by idiotsecant

3/9/2026 at 5:29:40 PM

Which to we ignore for coal? Cost to build a new plant? Cost to run? The decommissioning costs? (Yes we ignore the externalities, and no I don't think we should burn coal. My point is Nuclear has yet to pay its way anywhere in the world, without heavy heavy govt support - far exceeding that given to renewables)

Some figures on running costs: Coal costs about £62 per MWh - (£31 for the coal and £31 for the CO2 premium we already charge the energy producers).

As a fossil fuel comparison, Gas costs about £114 per MWh.

Nuclear - Hinkley C will cost about £128 per MWh - but likely to be even higher when it comes online. And we will be on the hook for this price as long as it runs, no matter how cheap renewables are.

by ljf

3/9/2026 at 8:00:37 PM

> As a fossil fuel comparison, Gas costs about £114 per MWh.

You're comparing the cost for coal as baseload to the cost for natural gas as a peaker plant. When using both for baseload, natural gas is cheaper than coal and emits less CO2.

Meanwhile renewables are cheaper than both until they represent enough of the grid that you have to contend with intermittency:

https://www.ourworldofenergy.com/images/electrical-power-gen...

Which doesn't happen until it gets close to being a majority of generation, and which most countries aren't at yet so can add more without incurring significant costs for firming.

In other words, the currently cheapest way to operate a power grid, if that's all you care about, is to have something like half renewables and half natural gas. Add some nuclear -- even just, don't remove any -- and CO2 goes down by a lot because then you're only using natural gas for peaking/firming instead of baseload, while still having costs in line with historical norms.

The obviously bad thing many places are doing is shutting down older power plants without building enough new capacity in anything else to meet existing demand, and then prices go up. But that's not because you're using e.g. solar instead of coal, it's because you're trying to use demand suppression through higher prices instead of coal. It's easy to get rid of coal as long as you actually build something else.

by AnthonyMouse

3/9/2026 at 6:04:25 PM

>Which to we ignore for coal? Cost to build a new plant? Cost to run? The decommissioning costs? (Yes we ignore the externalities, and no I don't think we should burn coal. My point is Nuclear has yet to pay its way anywhere in the world, without heavy heavy govt support - far exceeding that given to renewables)

Yes, all three. Building a nuke plant without the additional concern for outcome that we put on nuke would be relatively inexpensive. It's just concrete, pumps, and a turbine. It's a ismilar level of complexity to a coal plant. Same with running cost, same with decommissioning costs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly...

Suppose we designed, operated, and budgeted every coal plant to make accidents like this a statistical impossibility. Not very unlikely, that's not the standard we hold nuke to. An impossiblity. Imagine what that would cost.

by idiotsecant

3/9/2026 at 6:27:01 PM

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.

by TheOtherHobbes

3/9/2026 at 7:41:34 PM

"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 operating costs because they're so old, many of them were built more than half a century ago. Newer reactors often have higher costs because of the lack of scale. If you only build one or two of something you have to amortize the development costs over that many units, mistakes that require redoing work are being made for the first time, etc. Build more of them and the unit cost goes down.

by AnthonyMouse

3/9/2026 at 9:14:25 PM

Fuel storage and reprocessing isnt where vast majority of of the cost is for nuclear power, construction and decommissioning are.

These are what makes it cost 5x solar or wind.

by pydry

3/10/2026 at 6:23:04 AM

"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 natural gas plant (because you need so much less fuel).

What this implies is that if you build a nuclear plant you're going to want to continue operating it for 80 years, and even then you probably want to just modernize it again instead of actually decommissioning it.

The long-term average returns from ordinary investments (e.g. S&P 500) are ~10%/year, implying that even if you require decommissioning to be prefunded (unlike any competing form of power generation), the amount of money you need is less than 0.05% of what the cost will be in 80 years. Adding $500 million in decommissioning costs isn't $500M in net present costs, it's only $250 thousand in net present costs, because you take the $250k and add 80 years worth of interest (1.10^80) which multiplies your starting capital by more than a factor of 2000.

It's really just the construction, and that's in significant part because you have to build more of them to get economies of scale for building them.

by AnthonyMouse

3/10/2026 at 9:34:22 AM

>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 dispatchable energy source like batteries or gas just as solar and wind do.

It isnt a competitor with gas or batteries it is a complement to gas and batteries, just like solar and wind.

by pydry

3/10/2026 at 7:05:16 PM

> 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.

by AnthonyMouse

3/9/2026 at 11:42:32 PM

Are you implying that a coal plant doesn't have literally every single one of these? I have done industrial controls engineering for both and coal plants are actually quite complex. Take my word for it, they're well within spitting distance of one another, at the most basic level. The only difference is the enormous level of surety provided in a nuke plant design.

by idiotsecant

3/9/2026 at 4:39:06 PM

Coal is teetering on the edge of economic viability. In the US, our coal-obsessed administration is now at the point of forcing coal power plants to remain operational against the wishes of their owners who want to shut them down as they’re no longer profitable.

by wat10000

3/9/2026 at 4:59:38 PM

> Coal is cheap

Only if you ignore all externalities including:

- environmental damage from mining (yes this exists for renewables too)

- global warming

- pollution on city infrastructure

- pollution on health

- the sunk costs causing higher transition costs when inevitably you transfer to renewables anyways.

by cguess

3/9/2026 at 8:28:12 PM

>Only if you ignore all externalities

Not even then. Coal is dead, and gas killed it. The externalities are a distraction, coal plants are just straight-up uneconomic.

by Qwertious

3/9/2026 at 5:08:14 PM

> Only if you ignore all externalities

Do not discount how easy that is to do. Your list is of costs not to any bottom line of a company with bean counters. Those external costs are out side the scope of their concerns. Your list of concerns would be something for C-suite types, but the pressure of stock prices again make the external costs easy to set aside.

by dylan604

3/9/2026 at 5:08:57 PM

Sure, but as a consumer you can also care about these things.

by cguess

3/9/2026 at 6:35:26 PM

Sure, but there's only so many places to buy electricity from

by dylan604

3/9/2026 at 4:09:30 PM

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

by Schlagbohrer

3/9/2026 at 4:30:06 PM

They do have 3 already and they're building 3 more:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_high-voltage_transmiss...

The new one going to France will probably have the most impact initially, the French love to sell their Nuke's surplus capacity. The new British ones by the time they're finished should have access to British's big wind energy generation, much of which will be online at that point.

by TechnicalVault

3/10/2026 at 7:26:22 AM

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.

by Gareth321

3/9/2026 at 6:44:25 PM

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

by weirdmantis69

3/9/2026 at 2:37:13 PM

| more and more cost-of-living protests

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...

by Dannymetconan

3/9/2026 at 2:48:30 PM

> 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.

by disgruntledphd2

3/9/2026 at 2:54:41 PM

Agreed. As I said in another comment it is a policy decision to rely on market forces while making little effort to reform the planning process. We should be a world leader in wind energy but the planning process holds us back hugely.

by Dannymetconan

3/9/2026 at 3:45:43 PM

Governmens around the world trying to shift blame from gtid caoacity managers (so, themselves) to users because "they just consume too much".

In no other industry are providers ever worried about selling too much.

by PowerElectronix

3/9/2026 at 5:42:27 PM

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.

by pembrook

3/9/2026 at 7:37:37 PM

They are the same side of the coin but one has a much larger effect then the other depending on where your are. Energy has always been expensive in Ireland and home insulation poor (though there have been lots of grants)

| NIMBY-ism.

True but it effects are much worse due to poor planning laws

by Dannymetconan

3/9/2026 at 4:26:42 PM

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.

by linhns

3/9/2026 at 1:18:48 PM

This attitude is ill informed.

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.

by jahnu

3/9/2026 at 4:08:23 PM

> 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.

by bluescrn

3/9/2026 at 9:36:05 PM

Sorry I missed your question. While being a tax haven was part of Ireland’s strategy, given we have little natural resources for export or refining for heavy industries, we also have a well educated workforce which spoke English as a first language and were once cheaper than British workers and also, enthusiastically part of the EU. So we built up a service industry and high tech and high value industries like pharmaceutical and IT. We no longer are the (in my view once somewhat shameful) tax haven we were but now are low tax in a much more fair way (probably could be better but all countries are working the system). Opinions differ. But Ireland is genuinely wealthy and productive. We have serious problems with inequality and a stupid housing problem in the bigger cities. Nevertheless, compared to most of the world and compared to the Ireland of my youth it’s a great if imperfect place where you can have a great quality of life.

by jahnu

3/9/2026 at 2:01:44 PM

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

by Spooky23

3/9/2026 at 2:49:35 PM

21% of all energy is now being consumed by data centers with not enough investment in new forms of energy generation.

This is a policy decision by the government. More realistically it is a decision to not proactively do anything and instead rely on market prices to encourage new entrants to the market.

https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-dcmec/dat...

by Dannymetconan

3/9/2026 at 5:14:42 PM

Would any free market proponent like to chime in here? Why hasn’t this occurred?

by lostlogin

3/9/2026 at 5:22:05 PM

It's not a free market in Europe since there is vast amount of planning regulations involved etc. If you want to see free markets in action, look at the electricity prices in Texas, where ironically renewables are also the dominant source. https://www.gridstatus.io/live

by dmitri1981

3/9/2026 at 8:17:56 PM

Texas is an interesting example because they allowed true unregulated rates for residential consumers. Consumers liked getting lower rates until that winter storm a few years ago had bills for some in the $thousands. Then they didn't like the free market so much.

by thinkcontext

3/10/2026 at 7:28:45 AM

It did suck, but even when we factor that spike into the equation (including the outages), Texans end up paying for less for electricity in aggregate. Texas has also beefed up winter hardening requirements since then.

by Gareth321

3/9/2026 at 7:21:04 PM

It's actually fine in theory but it's nearly impossible to build anything in Ireland due to the way the planning laws work.

In an ideal situation we would be seeing a ramp up in production of all types to take advantage of the costs.

by Dannymetconan

3/9/2026 at 5:39:28 PM

weird, because wouldnt part of the price for electricity include the network?

Are you telling me that the electricity purchasing is like me purchasing from amazon, but but never charges shipping, or factor it into the products, and then suddenly cant ship because all trucks are used and no money to buy new?

by redeeman

3/9/2026 at 8:38:55 PM

Demand has gone up largely because of data centers. Supply has not increased enough so expensive options are the marginal supplier. Grids costs are also build into tariffs.

What is your point?

by Dannymetconan

3/9/2026 at 2:15:57 PM

A very fair question and the answer is complicated. Production costs and transmission costs are separate. Also demand changes the market rate. And even if renewables are cheaper to produce in a market usually the highest price regardless of source sets the price. This is to incentivise the cheapest production methods to be invested in.

It’s a massive topic and I encourage everyone to go and dive into it. It’s endlessly fascinating and also one of the really positive stories in the world right now which can help balance your emotions in a sometimes depressing world. At least for me it does.

by jahnu

3/9/2026 at 2:20:38 PM

> This is to incentivise the cheapest production methods to be invested in.

It's also just a rule of economics. The price is set at the cost of the most expensive production necessary to meet demand.

So if solar could fulfill 100% of energy demand, price would be the cost of solar, and any other more expensive generation would either lose money, shut down or idle.

But if we shut down or idle those today we wouldn't have enough electricity, so the price rises until the more expensive plants can stay open and demand is met.

by bryanlarsen

3/9/2026 at 4:06:12 PM

... So then why isn't the solar to replace the more expensive plants getting built?

by zahlman

3/9/2026 at 4:25:28 PM

Because at the moment wind has been the winner in the Irish climate, especially when you look backwards long enough to account for the time scales over which energy buildouts occur. Renewables have grown to 40% of the overall supply, resulting in the most expensive plants (currently coal plants, and before that peat) closing. Solar is entering the market rapidly though, it grew from like 1% to 4% in the last 3 years. So I wouldn’t be surprised to see some gas plants closing in the next few years, given the more expensive options are now already gone

by Macha

3/9/2026 at 4:18:00 PM

Snarky response deleted.

That rule is a rule of free markets. Electricity is not a free market, so it only partially applies. Texas is closer to a free market, and unsurprisingly it is adopting solar faster than most.

by bryanlarsen

3/9/2026 at 8:46:08 PM

>Snarky response deleted.

We appreciate your restraint.

by Qwertious

3/9/2026 at 8:45:11 PM

It is. But solar produces most around midday and then tapers off toward dawn/dusk, so it might supply 100% of demand at midday but only 10% around sunset.

If you build more solar it'll meet 100% of demand for a larger portion of the day, which is what we're doing.

by Qwertious

3/9/2026 at 9:50:47 PM

Solar is best used to take care of peak summer demand. It’s not gonna displace coal plants which tend to make up base load.

by Spooky23

3/10/2026 at 1:33:30 AM

Base generation is a cost optimization that's been irrelevant ever since peaking plants became cheaper to operate than continuous operation plants. Any grid that can handle peak loads can also handle base loads.

by bryanlarsen

3/9/2026 at 2:59:11 PM

It is not that complicated. When the energy crisis in EU happened a few years ago, it demonstrated clearly that people and industry is willing to pay a years worth of energy bills for a single month to keep lights and machine operating. What this mean is that you could in concept give people free power for 11 months, and then increase electricity prices by 12x for the remaining month, and people would still pay it.

This also demonstrated through most countries in Europe that citizens will vote to have government that fix the energy market. Citizens do not want a free energy market that can raise prices to any degree, and its their tax money that fund grid stability.

This all mean that the cheapest form of producing energy do not result automatically in reduced energy costs for consumers and companies. The product that people pay for is not energy in a pure form, it is energy produced at a given time and given location. Make the energy free but the time and location expensive, and the total cost will still be expensive.

Transmission can help Ireland, but it can also hurt it by linking it to a larger market that can create a even higher demand spikes than exist in the current local grid. If the linked grid has locations which has higher energy costs than Ireland, then Ireland will subsidize those people by linking the markets together. Rules like highest price regardless of source sets the price, and higher amount of transmissions, also tend to result in more companies getting paid to maintain operations and thus more parties getting paid that is not linked to the marginal cost of producing energy.

by belorn

3/9/2026 at 4:14:36 PM

It's really not. Energy grids are not designed for distributed generation. In my US state, that means billions of infrastructure investment.

The people using carbon to create forcing functions to transition to renewables conveniently forget to mention that. Which sucks, as solar in particular is almost a miracle product, but at this point my delivery charges to get electricity exceed the electricity supply by 10%. 20 years ago, delivery was 30% of supply.

My state, New York, decided it would be smart to turn off the nuclear plant that supplies 20% of NYC electricity, and replace it over a decade with a rube goldberg arrangement of gas, offshore wind, solar, and Canadian imports. The solar is hampered by distribution capacity, gas was slowed down by corruption and is being limited by environmental activists, we elected a president that believes that windmills give you cancer, and of course we are picking fights with Canada now.

by Spooky23

3/9/2026 at 6:33:46 PM

Renewables run on competent government.

If you don't have competent government, that's not the fault of renewables.

This is not snark. With forward-looking rational planning the transition could have started decades ago, and we could have had a low carbon energy economy by 2010 at the latest.

But fossils make so much money they can buy the policy they want, and here we are arguing about national tactics instead of planetary strategy.

by TheOtherHobbes

3/9/2026 at 2:23:43 PM

Mostly because marginal pricing/merit order.

In a vast over simplfication, the most expensive producer that gets to supply sets the overall price. So even if you supply 99% from wind and hydro, the 1% of power that comes from gas sets the price for 100% of the electricity in the market.

When gas gets more expensive, electricity from gas gets more expensive. The more you have to rely on gas (because you don‘t have batteries, not enough solar, etc), the more you pay high prices.

There are different ways to address these issues. Demand side load management, batteries, etc.

by moooo99

3/9/2026 at 3:58:43 PM

Solar is priced based on gas prices as a financial incentive to encourage producers to build solar. That’s because profiting from the difference between the cost of production for solar and the cost of production from gas is supposed to be the incentive to build solar.

The gas prices went up massively in 2022 with the war in Ukraine, and even though that subsided before the war in Iran a little, the existing supply companies are not going to give back an increase in the price they’ve gained because their prices dropped.

by Macha

3/9/2026 at 2:09:29 PM

because you start internalizing costs

by julkali

3/9/2026 at 2:21:59 PM

You would have to normalize against other costs and do a deep dive to really understand. My first question would be whether electricity (commercial and residential) has become relatively more expensive than gas, beer, and other commodities. If it's the same rate then it's more of an overall inflation thing. If electricity really is far and away higher than the rest over time then one would have to look at laws, the grid, demand, and of course supply too.

by AdamN

3/9/2026 at 2:52:13 PM

> You would have to normalize against other costs and do a deep dive to really understand.

The tricky part here is that energy is an input to basically everything. It's a major (through fertiliser) input to food, and then all of transport and stocking of said food which tends to be how energy changes influence downstream inflation. So I think you'd probably need a deeper analysis to tease out these issues.

by disgruntledphd2

3/10/2026 at 9:59:28 AM

That's only in-region. Ireland imports all sorts of stuff so just look at imports if you want to exclude the energy impact on everything else.

by AdamN

3/9/2026 at 2:27:50 PM

The price of energy drives inflation. It shouldn't be going up if the claims the new source is cheaper is true (surprise, it's not.)

by coryrc

3/9/2026 at 4:53:33 PM

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

Talk about ill informed.

by j-krieger

3/9/2026 at 5:40:14 PM

Yes Ireland is rich.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/median-in...

by jahnu

3/9/2026 at 11:17:32 PM

Not according to your own source

by j-krieger

3/10/2026 at 6:09:02 AM

It’s literally the 19th richest country in that source. Unless you have more to offer than contradiction I have nothing more for you. Have a good one!

by jahnu

3/9/2026 at 2:50:27 PM

> 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.

by disgruntledphd2

3/9/2026 at 4:52:32 PM

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, albeit essential.

by jahnu

3/9/2026 at 9:08:51 PM

Iceland (geothermal) and Sweden (hydro + nuclear) comes knocking.

by cjblomqvist

3/9/2026 at 4:18:56 PM

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

Unfortunately it's not the people/generation who reaped the rewards from cheap energy and polluting who are now being made to feel the pain of the transition.

by bluescrn

3/9/2026 at 7:49:33 PM

[dead]

by fleroviumna

3/9/2026 at 2:21:36 PM

[flagged]

by paganel

3/9/2026 at 1:32:33 PM

[flagged]

by throw567643u8

3/9/2026 at 1:45:44 PM

> they know windpower and solar are not viable long term

That’s why they are installing it all over their country at the fastest pace of any country by far? That’s why they probably hit peak oil consumption?

The coal thing is complicated in China. They are replacing many old coal stations, local governments are fearful of being caught short in a cold winter which has happened. Rate of coal consumption increases is slowing. Peak coal may have happened last year.

https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-why-china-is-still-bu...

Hopefully this new info might help change your views.

by jahnu

3/9/2026 at 1:42:50 PM

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_China

>"China is the world's top electricity producer from renewable energy sources. China's renewable energy capacity is growing faster than its fossil fuels and nuclear power capacity.[1] China installed over 373 GW of renewables in 2024, reaching a total installed renewable capacity of 1,878 GW by the end of the year. The country aims to have 80% of its total energy mix come from non-fossil fuel sources by 2060, and achieve a combined 1,200 GW of solar and wind capacity by 2030.[1]

>Although China currently has the world's largest installed capacity of hydro, solar and wind power, its energy needs are so large that some fossil fuel sources are still used."

Seems more renewables came online than non-renewables, perhaps your take is outdated?

by s_dev

3/9/2026 at 3:21:33 PM

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-consumption-by-count...

China is the world's top consumer of coal, and accounts for more than 50% of the world's total consumption of coal.

by TremendousJudge

3/9/2026 at 3:30:25 PM

People keep forgetting in all the China-posting that China is a country of 1.4 billion people, approximately 256 times the size of the Irish population, and therefore it's not really surprising when it tops a "top consumption" or "top production" list of any kind.

(second most populous after India)

Alternatively, if all Ireland was a city in China, it would not be in the list of top 50 cities by population.

by pjc50

3/9/2026 at 4:32:16 PM

While it's not surprising that's in the top, it's surprising by how much. ~1/7th of the world population, but ~55% of coal consumption is pretty unbalanced IMO. Of course, the real reason why is that China is the world's factory so the energy consumption is huge as well.

I think the real takeaway here is that the world depends on the industrial production of China, which is powered by coal. We are all using that coal to buy cheap Chinese manufactured goods, and the sooner we come to terms with this the better. Whether a single country uses coal or not is irrelevant for tackling carbon emissions, if we're all basically exporting our carbon emissions to China.

by TremendousJudge

3/9/2026 at 4:20:57 PM

India has bigger population than China.

India is building 41 coal plant, China is building 289. India approved 5 more plants, China approved 405. China is building more coal power than all other countries combined including India.

This thread is crazy. guys just look at numbers first...

by throwaway290

3/9/2026 at 4:57:27 PM

Do have a look at the the numbers:

https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-coal-power-drops-in-chi...

by tpm

3/10/2026 at 6:28:16 AM

I actually have. continue

by throwaway290

3/9/2026 at 3:37:04 PM

Seems that you're in violent agreement. China is so large that it tops most metrics you throw at it, even when we consider them contradictory.

by falcor84

3/9/2026 at 4:34:50 PM

With its population and size, China will top production. But their coal plants have been coming up more than every other country combined. It's the percentages, not the absolutes.

by linhns

3/9/2026 at 3:38:31 PM

They're also closing down coal plants faster than anyone else and actually faster than planned because of the price of solar. Check your facts.

by Peanuts99

3/9/2026 at 4:05:56 PM

https://www.forbes.com/sites/katharinabuchholz/2026/02/27/ch...

by dionian

3/9/2026 at 7:08:59 PM

Believe it or not, you're both correct! China is closing more (old, inefficient, polluting) coal plants than anybody else, and opening newer ones than anybody else.

by decimalenough

3/9/2026 at 4:32:15 PM

> "This argument that we have to self destruct to have the moral highground"

That's not the argument they made.

> "they know windpower and solar are not viable long term"

Thanks for the nonsensical, unsupported, right-wing talking points, throwaway account. Great contribution.

> "Web search how many Chinese coal plants came online in the last six months."

I web searched and found that "China installed a record 315 GW (AC) of new solar capacity in 2025". The entire UK national grid is currently providing 35GW of power from all sources combined. That's 1/9th of the power China deployed in just solar panels just last year. And China deployed 119GW of wind turbines in the same year as well.

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/01/28/china-adds-315-gw-of-...

by jodrellblank

3/9/2026 at 7:10:05 PM

It’s a 50 day old account making, as you pointed out, factually incorrect claims.

Just assume it’s a clanker or propagandist and flag it imo

by lovich

3/9/2026 at 2:09:32 PM

I did not expect HN to become this geopolitical.

And are you sure about your claim? Every time I hear anything about China and Solar the core of it is that solar in China is growing more than anywhere else on the planet ( 40% increase in 2025 and creating ~11% of China's energy already )

And that there is no sign of that trend slowing down anytime soon. And why would it. Solar panels are dirt cheap and they have more than enough space for it.

China is also really strong in the battery space, so they have everything they need to ditch oil/coal eventually

by blensor

3/9/2026 at 2:44:55 PM

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 going to be pretty interesting to watch. I admit I was skeptical that current battery tech could be scaled up enough to make it financially doable, but China is very close to making me wrong on the topic. If they can be the first to truly seasonal storage that works without hand-waving games like pretending you can "just use another source" when you run out of storage I'll be very impressed.

They seem to understand that you need to back unreliable sources with reliable sources - and have the political means to build a coal plant that will sit idle 95% of the time.

No other country is close - it's parlor tricks at the moment. China seems to understand how energy works, and that you need a reliable grid to run an industrial economy. They are very much being pragmatic in how they are building out everything they possibly can. The West has forgotten this.

by phil21

3/9/2026 at 4:29:23 PM

They’re building more dirty plants than anyone, but they’re STILL making their mix cleaner at an impressive clip. Over 80% of new electric demand growth was met by renewables in 2024.

by p_j_w

3/9/2026 at 3:17:33 PM

> 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.

by tpm

3/10/2026 at 3:31:58 AM

Who else is building more nuclear or coal, regardless of the reason?

by phil21

3/9/2026 at 2:30:19 PM

There's plenty to criticize about China, but as far as energy production goes they are a leader and have demonstrated what can be done when the country is aligned (albeit by force in this case) to provide cheap and clean energy to power their economy.

The US, under the current admin, is literally the opposite of that.

by pstuart

3/9/2026 at 2:19:24 PM

> I did not expect HN to become this geopolitical.

Everything is geopolitical now. Expect the hawks to look at the "success" of Iran and move on to bombing China soon.

by pjc50

3/9/2026 at 1:47:16 PM

China has a significant investment in solar and wind power - is that just to convince us it's a good idea to buy it?

by IE6

3/9/2026 at 3:57:02 PM

if solar and wind is subsidized by europe or usa, selling solar and wind to them is great. taxpayer money goes east, everybody is happy, meanwhile china is constructing more coal plants than all the other countries combined https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/number-of...

by throwaway290

3/9/2026 at 5:00:46 PM

Yes the share of electricity produced by coal plants is going down: https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/china/

So it appears they’re building more renewable capacity than coal capacity.

by realityking

3/10/2026 at 6:31:53 AM

Your graph shows only increasing emissions from coal.

by the way also it shows increasing CO2 emissions from solar and wind. it doesn't make any sense

by throwaway290

3/11/2026 at 5:37:16 PM

Look at the graph labelled “ Share of generation (%)” to see the (relative) decline of coal.

by realityking

3/9/2026 at 1:45:24 PM

China leads the world in solar energy, by a wide margin. Yes, they have hedged their bets somewhat with coal, but you cannot claim with a straight face that China believes renewable energy is nonviable.

https://apnews.com/article/china-climate-solar-wind-carbon-e...

by ForHackernews

3/9/2026 at 1:42:18 PM

> they know windpower and solar are not viable long term

Why?

by thunfischtoast

3/9/2026 at 2:09:11 PM

Steelman: in the 2000's and 2010's China did not know if wind power and solar were viable in the long term. They put a lot of money in wind & solar, but also lots of alternatives: nuclear, coal, hydro, geothermal.

By 2020 it was obvious that wind & solar were viable long term, so investments in nuclear et al dried up. But they weren't convinced that batteries were viable long term, so they built a lot of coal peakers for night power.

By 2025 it became obvious that batteries were more viable and cheaper than coal peakers, so they've started to build battery storage at a vast scale.

So steelman is that the OP's viewpoint is ~10 years out of date.

by bryanlarsen

3/9/2026 at 3:00:56 PM

They know that sometimes it's not windy, and they know about night.

by lowdownbutter

3/9/2026 at 3:28:04 PM

>They know that sometimes it's not windy, and they know about night.

they also know about batteries

by john_strinlai

3/9/2026 at 3:38:29 PM

Fortunately they also know about batteries.

by rootusrootus

3/9/2026 at 2:05:46 PM

> Web search how many Chinese coal plants came online in the last six months.

I did and it was actually very few. In 2024 88% of new electricity in China came from solar and wind. https://www.eia.gov/international/analysis/country/chn

You should try doing some research instead of lying.

by triceratops

3/9/2026 at 2:46:45 PM

[flagged]

by throwaway27448

3/9/2026 at 2:55:50 PM

> 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!

by wesammikhail

3/9/2026 at 7:53:02 PM

[dead]

by fleroviumna

3/9/2026 at 1:14:34 PM

That's not how the international energy market works. You still have to buy your own, locally produced energy at international rates.

The huge energy price spikes are down to wars in Ukraine (gas, which is also used for electricity production) and the Middle East.

by 4ndrewl

3/9/2026 at 1:19:04 PM

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.

by throw567643u8

3/9/2026 at 2:17:22 PM

Sure, but then the taxpayer has to pay for it anyway. https://news.tvbs.com.tw/english/2690584

"TAIPEI (TVBS News) — Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰) announced on Tuesday (Nov. 19 2024) plans to subsidize Taiwan Power Company (台灣電力公司) with NT$100 billion to address rising international fuel costs and stabilize prices"

=> over $3bn USD! This is not a small amount of money.

by pjc50

3/9/2026 at 1:48:40 PM

Typically markets are good at optimizing everything that is priced into the market.

Long term price stability is currently not something that is optimized for.

One way to solve it is of course abandoning the ide of a market economy for power.

Another is to let those industries that need price stability buy that on the futures market.

by capitol_

3/9/2026 at 2:26:54 PM

You are right that Taiwan doesn't. But it has consequences, Taipower is forced to undercharge against market prices, but is backstopped by the government.

At the end of the day, it's a global market, and if you want it 'cheap' someone has to pick up the tab. Either it's taxpayers now, taxpayers in the future or consumers now.

https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2025/03/23/2...

by alastairr

3/9/2026 at 4:34:08 PM

I agree that the government should ensure low energy prices for industry, but Taiwan is a remarkably poor example.

Taiwan's energy policy is, as far as I know, the most pants-on-head stupid of any country in the world. As anyone knows, they are a small island at constant risk of a sea blockade and yet rely on sea imports for 98% of their energy. Not only that, but they _had_ more domestic production (nuclear) that they have been phasing out. Writing giant checks to import yet more oil by sea instead of boosting domestic production is a terrible idea for so many reasons.

by owenversteeg

3/9/2026 at 8:50:52 PM

Nuclear also relies on sea imports - nuclear fuel still needs to be imported, unless Taiwan has a uranium mine on the island. So nuclear doesn't solve the problem, it just kicks the can down the road.

by Qwertious

3/9/2026 at 9:17:24 PM

Easier to stockpile uranium than oil or gas though.

by pydry

3/9/2026 at 5:46:08 PM

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.

by pocksuppet

3/9/2026 at 3:21:55 PM

Ireland hasn't mined any coal in 35 years, this plant was not operating on domestic resources to begin with.

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.

by volkl48

3/9/2026 at 5:51:56 PM

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.

by rsynnott

3/9/2026 at 2:47:35 PM

> Over the last few years, we've graduated from providing cheap energy to now importing most of our energy.

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.

by disgruntledphd2

3/9/2026 at 3:20:18 PM

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.

by ZeroGravitas

3/9/2026 at 5:06:18 PM

Yup, things kinda suck because of our complete failure to get our fingers out here. Again, people keep trying to build better stuff, but the planning process and our very decentralised democratic processes don't. help.

by disgruntledphd2

3/9/2026 at 5:16:11 PM

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

by interludead

3/9/2026 at 1:28:17 PM

I do often wonder with this kind of thing whether an unspoken aspect of it is about not depleting the country's fossil fuels

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.

by JansjoFromIkea

3/9/2026 at 1:35:37 PM

> 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.

by rsynnott

3/9/2026 at 2:35:41 PM

The true costs of the "cheap energy" were hidden. The high costs of the new approach are directly caused by policy decisions.

https://progressireland.substack.com/p/irish-electricity-is-...

by borvo

3/9/2026 at 1:16:49 PM

Here in England we now drag the coal over on smoke spewing ships from Japan and Australia, rather than mine it here. The sum total of CO2 is higher than if we just mined it here. Net zero box ticking.

by throw567643u8

3/9/2026 at 1:26:51 PM

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.

by jahnu

3/9/2026 at 1:27:57 PM

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.

by walthamstow

3/10/2026 at 4:52:41 AM

> Ships are very efficient

Per ton, yes. In practical, it’s far more complicated. Ships turn “heavy fuel oil” which is one tiny step from crude. It’s literally the byproduct that we have no better use for except for extremely large slow diesel engines.

If the tankers had to burn more useful fuel, we wouldn’t do it. The emissions on this unrefined bulk fuel is extremely bad.

Rail competes for efficiency depending on sea factors, and truck never does. But mining locally is far far more efficient that shipping literally to the other side of the world on ships that are burning 45 tons of fuel per day.

by SV_BubbleTime

3/9/2026 at 1:37:00 PM

That's because we let all the industries go offshore, for the promises of Neoliberalism. That should never have happened either.

by throw567643u8

3/9/2026 at 2:02:17 PM

Goal-shifting aside, and be that as it may for offshoring, but Neoliberalism was Thatcher, and she was popular in part because the trade unions were seen as too powerful, which in part was because of the then-recent history of the coal miners' union going on strike and forcing a three-day week for much of British industry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Day_Week

by ben_w

3/9/2026 at 3:31:41 PM

> 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.

by danans

3/9/2026 at 8:54:04 PM

Indonesia would be the obvious replacement - Indonesia is a pacific island nation (the islandiest) which exports a ton of coal.

by Qwertious

3/9/2026 at 2:49:25 PM

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.

by saltysalt

3/9/2026 at 2:56:05 PM

> 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.

by disgruntledphd2

3/9/2026 at 3:04:55 PM

A LNG terminal would help. Lots of bad infrastructure decisions have left us extremely exposed to those external shocks you mentioned.

by saltysalt

3/9/2026 at 3:15:51 PM

An LNG terminal would not help for the current high prices. Europe is experiencing a gas price shock precisely because LNG is easy to store and transport. Asia gets half it's gas through the Strait of Hormuz, which is currently experiencing troubles. This means Asia is willing to pay a lot of premium for LNG, which in turn means that Europe has to match this premium otherwise LNG will go to Asia and not Europe.

Being dependent on gas is equal to being exposed to global shocks, unless you can cover your domestic needs purely with domestic gas extraction.

by short_sells_poo

3/9/2026 at 3:28:10 PM

Europe was getting cheap gas from Russia. It makes a big difference, the US gas is much more expensive.

by Synaesthesia

3/9/2026 at 3:40:03 PM

American energy exports are turning around in the mid-atlantic to go somewhere else instead because Europe is getting outbid.

"My energy prices are high" because you are getting outbid. You can't stop getting outbid by building more transport infrastructure. That terminal will go unused.

by mrguyorama

3/9/2026 at 3:18:30 PM

An LNG terminal wouldn't help with cost (it would probably increase it a bit, if anything, as the cost of building it would have to be paid back). It's desirable from an energy _security_ perspective; as it is we are very dependent on a pipeline to Britain.

by rsynnott

3/9/2026 at 3:36:27 PM

Actually it should help with both, because a on-island terminal would also provide LNG storage capacity which would buffer short-term price fluctuations. We have zero such storage.

Again, our poor decision making around national infrastructure is on our governments. They left have left us completely exposed to international markets.

by saltysalt

3/9/2026 at 5:03:34 PM

A lot of it relates to the planning process, they do keep trying to build things. One could argue that this is also their fault (and I do!) but there are good historical reasons (cough ray burke cough michael lowry) why we've ended up with such a bureaucratic, byzantine planning process.

by disgruntledphd2

3/9/2026 at 7:28:01 PM

Yes, there are many problems with the planning process, but as you conceded in another comment, the actual reason that we don't have an LNG terminal is that Eamonn Ryan nixed the possibility.

As usual with the Greens, perfection was the enemy of the good.

by Supernaut

3/9/2026 at 5:02:12 PM

Yeah, even though I voted (happily) for the Greens, I was very disappointed in them not building an LNG terminal, purely for energy security reasons. I'd be super happy if it never got used, but it's a cost worth paying just in case.

by disgruntledphd2

3/9/2026 at 4:15:42 PM

An LNG terminal would make us more beholden to foreign powers.

by a_paddy

3/9/2026 at 5:21:49 PM

> An LNG terminal would make us more beholden to foreign powers

This is a weird way to justify using LNG brought in through Britain.

by JumpCrisscross

3/9/2026 at 3:13:41 PM

> 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.

I'd add that this is only part of the equation because: what do you do on an overcast day with no wind?

You need significant storage capacity before you can become isolated from world events. Until then, you need power generation that you can bring online on short notice: coal, gas, hydro, etc. Traditionally, gas was used for this because it's easy to store, quick to get going and gas plants can also burn coal if needed.

Unfortunately, the nice properties of gas (easy to store and transport) mean that it's a global commodity. It will go where they pay the most, which means that far away events can cause a price in gas prices globally.

by short_sells_poo

3/9/2026 at 5:04:49 PM

> 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.

by disgruntledphd2

3/9/2026 at 8:39:53 PM

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.

by hihitsdumb

3/10/2026 at 5:54:46 PM

Is Ireland going to burn the batteries after they buy them from China? If China says "Do what we say, or else no more batteries" then...nothing bad happens. Ireland's batteries continue to work.

Coal or gas on the other hand...anyone can cut off Ireland anytime.

by triceratops

3/9/2026 at 8:56:54 PM

There's at least as much battery production of batteries in Ireland as there are viable coal mine sites.

by Qwertious

3/9/2026 at 11:58:29 PM

And crucially batteries aren't fuel they're storage.

Also all these economies do make stuff, they just don't employ huge numbers of semi-skilled workers to do so. Most of the factory jobs are gone, but the factories are not. I live in a port city, about a century ago this city had loads of jobs crewing ships and loading cargo but today more work is done by a tiny fraction as many people.

by tialaramex

3/9/2026 at 3:12:57 PM

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.

by cbeach

3/9/2026 at 4:35:59 PM

> 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.

by p_j_w

3/9/2026 at 9:10:52 PM

By all means, calculate an arbitrary uplift on the price based on your own definitions of externalities.

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)

by cbeach

3/9/2026 at 9:42:08 PM

> externalities associated with mining materials to manufactur solar panels and wind turbine

Solar panels can be recycled, so eventually they will need very little mining.

Have you ever recycled gasoline? Have you ever heard of the Deepwater Horizon?

I think you're being disingenuous while accusing others.

by triceratops

3/10/2026 at 12:54:10 AM

Even if all the solar panels in the world were recycled, you’ve barely scratched the surface of the points I made.

by cbeach

3/10/2026 at 1:51:19 AM

You haven't made any.

by triceratops

3/9/2026 at 8:36:09 PM

Unless you manufacture it locally, with a fully local supply chain, wind and solar are still susceptible to world events.

by hihitsdumb

3/10/2026 at 1:50:27 AM

Is someone turning off the wind and sun? Once the infrastructure is installed it produces energy for years. Solar panels aren't burned to make energy, like oil or gas are. And you can recycle them.

by triceratops

3/10/2026 at 6:14:47 AM

You need tons of oil to lubricate wind turbines.

by t0bia_s

3/10/2026 at 1:27:21 PM

Sure you do. You need more oil to lubricate wind turbines than you do for gasoline, diesel, engine oil, transmission fluid, brake fluid...totally believable. And coal and natural gas turbines don't need any lubrication whatsoever.

by triceratops

3/9/2026 at 3:07:28 PM

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.

by thrance

3/9/2026 at 2:27:35 PM

> providing cheap energy to now importing most of our energy

Source for this claim? figures show 10-15% of power is imported, not "most", and those fluctuate with wind generation.

by turtlesdown11

3/9/2026 at 2:34:20 PM

Energy ≠ electricity

by IrishTechie

3/9/2026 at 3:25:11 PM

Lots of signal that this top post is now an LLM an not "an Irish man". The generous use of dashes to complete the thought process..have a look: https://www.dcaulfield.com/chatgpt-learning-dev

by 1970-01-01

3/9/2026 at 6:31:44 PM

Coal is the most expensive form of power still widely used and it's not even close.

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.

by array_key_first

3/9/2026 at 1:31:55 PM

We never had particularly cheap energy. The recent increases in energy cost were largely driven by gas price increases due to the war in Ukraine.

> 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.

by rsynnott

3/9/2026 at 2:17:45 PM

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)

by roryirvine

3/9/2026 at 4:43:09 PM

So glad you're taking the hit for the rest of us. Your sacrifice is totally worth the .001% difference you make, every little bit counts.

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.

by observationist

3/9/2026 at 8:25:19 PM

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.

by toraway

3/9/2026 at 2:59:54 PM

I have never been to a country where the wind blows at plus 60kph for months at a time (Wexford). I don't think I have ever been there in the last 20 years where the wind has not been howling, the potential for Wind Power there is insane.....

by sleepyguy

3/9/2026 at 2:47:51 PM

It's insanity to stop using country own resources and rely on unreliable tech and energy imports.

As I browse the comments here I lament that most "above average IQ" folks still don't get this simple truth.

by karol

3/9/2026 at 3:16:47 PM

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).

by rsynnott

3/9/2026 at 3:33:03 PM

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 ?

by cassepipe

3/9/2026 at 3:41:52 PM

Hard to see past the scientific consensus on global warming

by turtlesdown11

3/9/2026 at 4:00:59 PM

[flagged]

by NamlchakKhandro

3/9/2026 at 6:30:34 PM

On the one hand there are scientists who say it is happening.

On the other hand there are sock-puppets for oil billionaires who say it isn't happening.:

"Established in 2015, the CO2 Coalition is dedicated to “educating thought leaders, policy makers, and the public about the important contribution made by carbon dioxide to our lives and the economy.” The Coalition has received funding from the Koch brothers — the right-wing libertarian U.S. oil billionaires who have been at the heart of climate change denial in the United States"

by jodrellblank

3/9/2026 at 3:03:40 PM

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.

by thrance

3/9/2026 at 3:40:08 PM

When AMOC collapses (which it will relatively soon) and Ireland is plunged into forever winter, get back to us on how great burning all that coal was.

by bayarearefugee

3/9/2026 at 5:42:12 PM

The longer we put off solving climate change, the more expensive it is going to be for the poor and middle-classes.

by babypuncher

3/9/2026 at 2:21:19 PM

Reminds me of the FT article on the UK's energy transition and how costs were being spread through the system.

https://www.ft.com/content/86fdb9e4-3db4-4e4f-8e47-580a1fad2...

Made some reasonable points imo

by Ntrails

3/9/2026 at 9:44:54 PM

providing cheap energy

From what, turf? Back in the 1980s Ireland was importing coal from Poland because domestic mines weren't efficient. You're full of it.

by anigbrowl

3/9/2026 at 3:15:29 PM

What's your source for Irish coal energy being cheap!?

by bjourne

3/9/2026 at 4:48:25 PM

ChatGPT : "tell me about China use of coal energy"

"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.

by htx80nerd

3/9/2026 at 5:04:38 PM

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.

by otherme123

3/9/2026 at 5:47:16 PM

[dead]

by cozyman

3/9/2026 at 4:56:21 PM

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-...

by Lio

3/9/2026 at 9:14:26 PM

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

BREAKING NEWS: China is big.

by Qwertious

3/9/2026 at 4:43:00 PM

Cheap energy from coal is very expensive energy. Who’s going to clean up the pollution? Carbon capture uses a lot of energy

by danny_codes

3/9/2026 at 5:14:17 PM

The bigger issue might be whether the transition is being managed in a way that protects consumers

by interludead

3/9/2026 at 5:50:19 PM

Oof. That paints it in a different light. They arent investing in renewables?

by samrus

3/10/2026 at 9:41:16 AM

Eh not sure what you're talking about.

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.

by NoLinkToMe

3/9/2026 at 4:57:34 PM

Even if you ignore the climate impact, fossil fuels pollution causes millions of premature deaths a year, and unlike with global warming, that effect is localized. That alone should be reason to transition off of fossil fuels, especially coal which is the dirtiest.

by Aunche

3/10/2026 at 7:34:04 AM

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.

by Gareth321

3/9/2026 at 1:46:38 PM

Another Irishman here. Stop trying to harken back to some notional "good old days" that didn't exist. People are better off than they've ever been. Energy was always expensive relative to income. When I was a kid in the 80s, we weren't allowed to turn on the central heating unless there were arctic conditions. The main issue driving COL issues is the complete lack of social housing construction for the last 15 years. You can't blame the tree huggers for that. Renewable energy is a matter of national security, and prevents our hard earned money being sent overseas to regimes like Russia and all the charmers in the Middle East. Our very first electricity plant as a free state was hydro ffs.

by entropyie

3/9/2026 at 3:27:07 PM

In this thread: the rich, unaffected class instruct the poor that their plight is in fact a fabrication. History really does repeat itself.

by aliasxneo

3/10/2026 at 4:40:14 AM

Look forward to the San Francisco upper class telling you how wrong you are about Irish energy and politics.

by SV_BubbleTime

3/9/2026 at 3:18:12 PM

Where was that coal coming from?

by MiscIdeaMaker99

3/9/2026 at 3:59:27 PM

Hey you're still better than Germany that closed all their eco friendly power down and started importing so much energy it's had an effect on prices in Sweden!

I mean, at least you shut down the coal plants, those are legit bad for the environment. Germans shut down nuclear which is clean.

by amarant

3/10/2026 at 4:48:01 AM

Same thing is happening in Australia. This is what happens when you vote socialists into power.

by ting0

3/9/2026 at 1:10:10 PM

[flagged]

by mrits

3/9/2026 at 3:04:57 PM

[flagged]

by delaminator

3/9/2026 at 3:32:59 PM

Ireland's population has still not exceeded its high point before the potato famine and the mass export of the population.

by pjc50

3/9/2026 at 4:43:26 PM

[flagged]

by delaminator

3/9/2026 at 4:41:20 PM

Ireland isn't importing most of its population. Have you been scrolling social media too much? You know anyone can write anything they want on there, right? Lol

by Eldt

3/9/2026 at 3:26:32 PM

Just for the record, neither of these things is suicidal. There are many prosperous countries importing energy and allowing foreigners to settle. Probably even most of them.

by tpm

3/9/2026 at 4:08:22 PM

[flagged]

by delaminator

3/9/2026 at 4:52:41 PM

You did not provide any fact supporting the 'suicidality' of anything, or even any definition of 'suicidality'. Also narrowly defined ethnicities are not humans, they cannot commit suicide.

by tpm

3/9/2026 at 9:51:56 PM

[flagged]

by delaminator

3/10/2026 at 12:58:06 AM

We've banned this account.

by tomhow

3/10/2026 at 9:37:49 AM

Cool, but late. There are tens of similar accounts active right now, and they are only banned after repeatedly and continously stepping over the line. Most of those accounts don't participate in good faith from day 1, but it takes 60-90 days for them to get banned. I don't know what to do about it, but it's a problem on HN for quite some time.

by AlexeyBelov

3/10/2026 at 5:17:14 PM

Please email us when you see them!

hn@ycombinator.com

by tomhow

3/10/2026 at 8:40:34 AM

[dead]

by delaminator

3/9/2026 at 3:06:52 PM

[flagged]

by cbeach

3/9/2026 at 3:21:42 PM

Their comment is kinda nonsense, tho. Every single lump of coal burned in Moneypoint over its operating life was imported. We don't have significant coal reserves, and Moneypoint was designed from the start to run on imported coal; it does not even have a railway link.

by rsynnott

3/9/2026 at 3:44:37 PM

Their comment is talking about a wider context than this single coal power station.

In the UK, Net Zero politics means we are killing our own North Sea fossil fuel extraction, only to purchase North Sea fossil fuel from Norway, at an increased environmental (and financial) cost.

That's the kind of political lunacy the OP is aluding to.

by cbeach

3/9/2026 at 3:46:37 PM

Okay, but do you have any examples of such alleged lunacy in Ireland? Ireland has no economically exploitable oil or coal, and what gas there is is largely exhausted.

by rsynnott

3/9/2026 at 3:53:54 PM

For Ireland, it's not so much the sourcing of fossil fuels, but the imposition of political taxes on fossil fuels onto consumers.

About 50% of the retail price of petrol in Ireland is tax (excise + carbon + VAT).

Overall fuel taxation in Ireland is ~50%, compared to 15-20% in the US. Although to be fair, most of Europe is doing the same thing to its population (during a cost of living crisis).

by cbeach

3/9/2026 at 4:05:40 PM

[flagged]

by NamlchakKhandro

3/9/2026 at 4:34:36 PM

Same in the UK. Instead of us generating electricity via coal, we get other people to do it less cleanly and import it instead. That way our hands are clean.

by gadders

3/9/2026 at 6:36:36 PM

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/

by jodrellblank

3/9/2026 at 3:44:25 PM

Why not make the rich pay for this? They can afford it. You're taking your anger out on the wrong people.

by behringer

3/9/2026 at 3:50:57 PM

There's a declaration that a 915 MW power-plant was removed from the grid, and moved to emergency status only.

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.

by kayo_20211030

3/9/2026 at 5:57:01 PM

AIUI it’s barely been operating for about a decade. Even before it closed (nearly a year ago; this is an old article), most days the eirgrid dashboard showed little or no coal in the mix.

by rsynnott

3/9/2026 at 12:58:11 PM

I feel we’re framing it in a negative way

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

by jorisboris

3/9/2026 at 1:37:58 PM

> Our goal should be to be 100% renewable.

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.

by crote

3/9/2026 at 3:45:00 PM

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.

by 1970-01-01

3/9/2026 at 5:24:26 PM

> This will be the coolest century this millennium.

While you are making predictions 975 years out, could we see your projected graph of human population? Time estimate for establishment of a permanent extraterrestrial colony?

by zahlman

3/9/2026 at 5:28:26 PM

No problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_population_projections

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_lunar_outpost_concepts#Ar...

by 1970-01-01

3/9/2026 at 1:37:52 PM

Coal is about as dirty as it gets (besides peat and lignite). _Even if you were not reducing CO2 output_, getting rid of coal would be greatly beneficial as you'd reduce COPD and other lung diseases.

by rsynnott

3/9/2026 at 1:30:02 PM

I am not sure it's a matter of how you frame the issue, to be honest, although I have seen this argument used quite a lot.

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.

by mk89

3/9/2026 at 5:31:37 PM

> 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.

by zahlman

3/9/2026 at 1:09:39 PM

Coal is the worst of the fossil sources though. Getting rid of coal is only the first step but it's a good one.

by wolvoleo

3/9/2026 at 4:51:50 PM

Just last week they were talking about the future of Irelands energy generation, and the pressure between now and 2028 from data centers and EVs. Reopening moneypoint as a backup has been discussed. It's been kept as a oil fired backup station, but given the current surge in oil prices I could see it turning to coal again.

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

by arkensaw

3/10/2026 at 12:42:39 AM

Coal is Extremely Dumb Hank Green https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfvBx4D0Cms

by CHB0403085482

3/9/2026 at 12:06:24 PM

Damn, and my country consumes 11 million out of 13 million tonnes of coal used for heating houses in the entire EU.

by eitau_1

3/9/2026 at 12:20:32 PM

Tell me where you are from without telling me where you are from...

Poland I guess?

by oezi

3/9/2026 at 1:19:17 PM

https://www.smartgriddashboard.com/roi/

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.

by s_dev

3/9/2026 at 2:26:24 PM

There's a lot of misinformation and misunderstanding of the global energy supply presented around me nowadays. I would urge anyone to stop what they're doing and read "Clearing the Air" [1]. It's completely reshaped my understanding of this problem, and I am far more optimistic after reading it.

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...

by deanc

3/9/2026 at 6:28:57 PM

I saw the data. They have replaced coal plants with gas plants. Mostly imported gas. Why do Europeans hate the idea of safe nuclear plants though?

https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?cha...

by nomdep

3/9/2026 at 7:19:05 PM

While nuclear was cost competitive a decade ago, it turns out that is no longer the case [0].

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-...

by pollorollo

3/9/2026 at 6:54:10 PM

I think it is unfair to specify safe here, as probably all nuclear powerplants are considered safe until they are not, including Fukushima. But plenty of European countries are either building or planing nuclear new nuclear power reactors, and Finland just opened a new reactor in 2023.

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.

by runarberg

3/10/2026 at 9:44:06 AM

Compare costs, monetary risk and TTM to renewables with battery backup. Nuclear is dead as a doornail.

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.

by mnau

3/9/2026 at 6:50:58 PM

Nuclear has bad branding.

by elAhmo

3/9/2026 at 6:54:56 PM

30 years of anti nuclear propaganda. They should all be like France, what a dream to have almost all of your electricity coming from a stable, essentially perpetual source.

by dyauspitr

3/9/2026 at 6:56:51 PM

Because there is no place for nuclear waste in Europe? Especially not on smaller islands like Ireland. Why do Americans hate the idea of cheap renewable energy?

by amai

3/9/2026 at 7:06:36 PM

Is HN being astroturfed? What’s up with all these pro-coal comments?

by kenferry

3/10/2026 at 12:11:23 AM

I wonder if there's a startup out there selling AI-generated comments for astroturfing HN, Reddit, et al. And then I wonder if that startup is a YCombinator company...

by teachrdan

3/9/2026 at 5:11:17 PM

A lot of these plants were built in the 70s-90s and were expected to run 40–50 years. Instead many are shutting early because renewables plus carbon pricing have simply made them uneconomical

by interludead

3/9/2026 at 7:03:18 PM

It is 2026 now. So thats 56 - 36 years from 1970-90. So it is not really a lot earlier than expected.

by amai

3/9/2026 at 2:19:41 PM

Ireland is a net energy importer who imports electricity from Great Britain. She, in turn, often imports from nations including France, Holland, and Denmark, who use coal power.

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.

by landl0rd

3/9/2026 at 2:50:03 PM

Ireland is building the Celtic Interconnector with France next, will import a lot of her electricity from there which predominately uses nuclear power to generate her electricity. I fear you're making perfect the enemy of better and genuine progress.

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.

by s_dev

3/9/2026 at 2:52:12 PM

I'm not the enemy of this progress at all and think it's a good thing. Same goes for the Celtic Interconnecter, though. My point is basically a) "coal-free" is misleading and this progress can be framed in other ways, and b) Ireland would have been better-served in terms of cost and environment to rely on even OCGTs than HFO.

by landl0rd

3/9/2026 at 2:25:33 PM

Ireland imports less than 10% of it's electricity from the UK. The UK _already_ decommissioned it's coal-based eletricity production. The UK imports roughly 14% of it's electricity, and most of those imports are from nuclear and hydro-electric power.

Your entire comment is incredibly misleading.

by empath75

3/9/2026 at 2:28:19 PM

No, it isn't. Power in a grid is fungible so grids operate based off consumption-based accounting. Britain continues to import at times from countries still burning coal. As such, Ireland is not free of coal dependence. It's really that simple. It is accurate for Ireland to say she no longer directly burns coal, no longer operates coal power, but the common understanding of "coal-free" is, "we are no longer directly dependent on coal for our lights to turn on." That simply isn't the case.

The way to think about this is, "If the grid had zero reserves and coal cut off, who could POSSIBLY go down?" You may figure this is constructed, but in a few days' dunkelflaute, Ireland needs her interconnects. Wind is then possibly low across much of Europe, meaning Holland and Germany ramp dispatchable capacity, including German lignite.

by landl0rd

3/9/2026 at 3:33:12 PM

I saw nobody making those arguments. Most people were thinking that Ireland doesn't burn coal anymore. People who think or care about this stuff know that interconnects exist.

by patrickmcnamara

3/9/2026 at 2:36:44 PM

>[...]Denmark, who use coal power

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...

by encom

3/10/2026 at 11:36:20 AM

I’m all for the substitution of cleaner energy sources for dirtier ones- but it feels like from a consumer and national autonomy standpoint for a country that imports the vast majority of its energy, concentrating supply might not be the best idea until renewables/energy-storage has been more built out

by balderdash

3/9/2026 at 1:15:26 PM

I understand that American shale gas (the largest fraction of LNG imports to the EU) is by certain measures as polluting as coal. If correct, Europe needs to reconsider if the price (and political) volatility is really worth it.

by brnt

3/10/2026 at 12:38:47 PM

Ireland has never had a big coal presence compared to neighbouring countries. An old Irish republican slogan was "Burn everything British apart from their coal ."

by nephihaha

3/9/2026 at 1:36:39 PM

Definitely a step in the right direction, but believe it or not-- I overheard a customer in Aldi asking for coal only last week! I couldn't believe it, the staff member didn't know where to send them

by fixxation92

3/9/2026 at 2:55:09 PM

They might want to reopen it, oil prices spiked to $120 a few hours ago.

by speedylight

3/9/2026 at 4:47:39 PM

ironically it's been converted to run on Oil now, as a backup

by arkensaw

3/9/2026 at 5:22:05 PM

Meanwhile, Germany is killing it’s heat pump mandate, re-introducing gas and offsetting it with single percentage “green” gas greenwashing mandates.

by ant6n

3/9/2026 at 1:59:52 PM

Dirty power generation, and dirty toxic hazardous industry in general, discriminate against the poor and minorities. That carries an enormous social cost that goes uncounted in discussions like the ones on this thread.

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.

by Zigurd

3/9/2026 at 5:03:09 PM

The top comment currently on this post is talking about the cost impacts being transferred to the poor and middle class with lots of discussion. I think people are well aware of and discuss the social impacts.

by snake42

3/9/2026 at 5:31:14 PM

They discuss "social impacts" from the point of view that dirtier power is cheaper, supposedly, hypothetically, net of externalities, while ignoring the cost dirty power inflicts on the people living near the dirty power generation.

by Zigurd

3/9/2026 at 3:41:34 PM

Meanwhile China has 1200 of them - well done Ireland I'm sure they will follow your lead once they get around to it.

by moominpapa

3/9/2026 at 3:01:02 PM

I think this is very strategically stupid decision (or crime committed by high management). Those should be preserved and be ready for use in case things go south which is not inconceivable judging by what is happening around

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

by FpUser

3/9/2026 at 5:05:57 PM

From the article: the Moneypoint plant will continue to serve a limited backup role, burning heavy fuel oil under emergency instruction from Ireland’s transmission system operator EirGrid until 2029.

by snake42

3/9/2026 at 11:11:54 AM

Just in time for an energy crisis :-)

by cbdevidal

3/9/2026 at 11:23:55 AM

They'd be better off with (and are building out) offshore and onshore wind. If you've ever been to the west coast of Ireland you'll know they've got almost unlimited wind energy. The country is targeting 5GW of capacity by 2030 and 37GW in the distant future[1].

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-...

by rwmj

3/9/2026 at 11:33:16 AM

> If only they could harness the power of rain, Ireland would truly be an energy superpower.

I know this is in jest, but that's basically "dam up some valley rivers and put a hydroelectric generator on the end", and unfortunately Ireland isn't so good for that. (It's not just the physical geology, it's also all the people living in the places you'd flood).

Hydro as a battery is easier and works in far more locations, but that's not harnessing the power *of rain*.

But yes, Ireland and the UK have an absolutely huge wind power resource available around them, IIRC enough to supply all of Europe if the grid connections were there to export it all.

by ben_w

3/9/2026 at 12:51:00 PM

There has been a lot of proposals to dam up massive unpopulated sea-facing valleys in Mayo and Donegal and use pumped hydro with seawater. Was a bit topic 15 years ago, but never happened. All that happened was the silvermines pump hydro plant that seems behind schedule.

Prof Igor Shvets was behind this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_of_Ireland

by jamesblonde

3/9/2026 at 12:44:27 PM

Ireland briefly had the biggest hydroelectric dam in the world until the Hoover dam was built… but that was before electricity production really took off. Ireland doesn’t really have the geography for dams, the hills and rivers are far too small.

by clickety_clack

3/9/2026 at 11:28:43 AM

Are they selling to UK that AFAIU stopped building wind 10 years ago. Regulatory advantage...

by Gravityloss

3/9/2026 at 11:58:49 AM

You're mistaken.

Onshore wind in England was de-facto but not de-jure banned by the Tories in 2018, due to a footnote inserted in their National Planning Policy Framework. Labour removed this footnote in 2024, immediately after winning the election. [0]

Offshore wind was never affected, nor onshore wind in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland.

[0] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/policy-statement-...

by amiga386

3/9/2026 at 5:02:07 PM

Thanks, I was quite mistaken indeed! I wonder how much onshore England then affected the big picture.

by Gravityloss

3/9/2026 at 5:13:12 PM

Well, Tories would argue that you can't get the really big turbines onshore that you can offshore, so it doesn't really matter. Tiddly little turbines don't generate that much, and why spend lots of money on the planning process and fighting NIMBYs when you can generate it offshore?

However, it does matter, when looked at in whole with the need for capacity in the National Grid. A pile of turbines across SE England would have really helped, because a lot of the offshore wind and Scottish wind power has to be dumped, and gas generators fired up instead, due to lack of grid capacity to distribute that power across the country.

We should, of course, have completed upgrades to the grid by now, but they're late.

Here's a great article about "curtailment" as it's known: https://ukerc.ac.uk/news/transmission-network-unavailability...

by amiga386

3/9/2026 at 11:35:12 AM

Not only has the UK not stopped building wind, they have over 30GW of installed wind capacity and sell electricity to Ireland for most of the year.

by womble2

3/9/2026 at 1:04:37 PM

The 'sell electricity to Ireland' bit here is doing an awful lot of work. It's more complicated than that.

For those who don't know, Ireland operates an all-island grid, and EirGrid (the grid operator for the Republic) owns SONI (the grid operator for Northern Ireland). That means that 'UK' and 'Ireland' in this has a large Northern Ireland shaped lump of ambiguity that statement.

by talideon

3/9/2026 at 5:01:33 PM

It shouldn't be that complicated. The UK sells electricity to Ireland (and vice-versa?) in the same way that Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Denmark and Norway sell electricity to the UK, and vice-versa.

Don't tell me EirGrid's EWIC that comes onshore at Dublin and Greenlink at County Wexford are an "NI-shaped lump". They are sources of electricity for the whole island, when it's needed, just like the UK's interconnects with the continent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_high-voltage_transmiss...

by amiga386

3/9/2026 at 1:40:24 PM

> Are they selling to UK that AFAIU stopped building wind 10 years ago.

... Eh? No it didn't; not sure where you got that.

Ireland and the UK sell power to each other on a demand basis, though in practice Ireland is usually a net importer: https://www.smartgriddashboard.com/all/interconnection/?dura...

by rsynnott

3/9/2026 at 11:33:11 AM

Uh? No they didn't stop at all?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_United_Kingd...

by hvb2

3/9/2026 at 11:43:12 AM

Tories during 2015-2023 made construction of new onshore wind farms all but impossible (removed subsidies and made planning permissions very difficult). I would assume Labor could reverse these polices but haven't seen anything in news about this.

by citrin_ru

3/9/2026 at 12:01:14 PM

Now you have: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/jul/08/... (2024)

Also https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/14/offshore...

Also https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/feb/10/uk-onshore-...

by amiga386

3/9/2026 at 12:32:04 PM

And a lot of offshore was constructed during that period.

So still claiming that we didn't build any wind power was false.

by happymellon