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

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.

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

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.

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...

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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%

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

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.

I've only so many shits to give, and people heating their homes doesn't rank.

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).

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)

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

Coal is neither cheap nor abundant in Ireland.

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.

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...

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/

Nuclear defeats coal in all of these aspects, aside from the high upfront cost.

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.

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.

In no other industry are providers ever worried about selling too much.

| NIMBY-ism.

True but it effects are much worse due to poor planning laws

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...

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.

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.

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.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/median-in...

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.

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.

>"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?

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-...

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

https://apnews.com/article/china-climate-solar-wind-carbon-e...

Why?

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.

"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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Prof Igor Shvets was behind this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_of_Ireland

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-...

... 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...

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

In 2000, coal was about 20% of the energy mix, gas another 20%, oil about 50%. Wind was 0%. In 2024 coal was about 2%, gas still 20%, oil still 50%, but wind grew to about 15%. It seems that wind actually replaced coal. It is not only logical, but good, that wind first replaced coal (dirtiest), and maybe from now on is will start to replace oil. Only after many decades, or maybe never, gas will be replaced.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/interactive-publications/e...

  crude oil and petroleum products (37.7%)
  natural gas (20.4%)
  renewable energy (19.5%)
  solid fuels (10.6%)
  nuclear energy (11.8%)

So natural gas was just barely more than renewables in 2023, but according to the source below the line was crossed in 2025 and renewables now provide more than all fossil fuels put together:

https://electrek.co/2026/01/21/wind-and-solar-overtook-fossi...

(Moneypoint was actually built originally due to Ireland's over dependence at the time on oil for power generation; after the oil crisis, initially ESB attempted to build a nuclear plant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnsore_Point#Cancelled_nucle...), but it was such a political minefield that it was canceled, leading to Moneypoint.)

It would feel weird to see this as a headline on a newspaper or on TV today, but maybe that is just me and people like to read new that are from last year.

It's not greyed out for me, either.