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...
> 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.
>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.
Nobody is building new coal plants...
...except China, who is building coal plants at a pace never seen in history. Are they dumb, or...?
They are replacing old dirty plants. Actual coal burned is not rising anymore.
So they are building new coal plants.
> Coal is cheap, abundant, energy dense.
Coal is neither cheap nor abundant in Ireland.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A quick Google shows EREOI of solar panels at 10-30 depending on study.
How close are Ireland to 100% wind during optimal weather?
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...
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?
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
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.
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.
Ah yes, the Landman argument.
https://youtu.be/wBC_bug5DIQ?si=rfKryFd9fgJ1Gw0h
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.
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...
Is your point that coal mining, transport, and usage have no negative externalities?
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.
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.
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.
...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.
Coal was abundant. British coal was mined out. The coal that is left isn’t economical to mine.
People said the same thing about many gas & oil fields in the Permian Basin back in the '70s.
How'd that work out?
Coal also isn’t really energy dense since so much of the energy is wasted when converting to electricity
It is still one of the densest sources. It's just not as dense as it naively seems.
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.
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.
"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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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/
> 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...
Way to high compared to actual cost. Almost half of fuel and electricity costs in Germany is tax.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
>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.
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.
> Coal is cheap, abundant, energy dense.
Nuclear defeats coal in all of these aspects, aside from the high upfront cost.
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.
We're already ignoring them all for coal plants, why not?
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.
> 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.
>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.
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.
"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.
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.
> 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.
>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.
> 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.
Sure, but as a consumer you can also care about these things.
Sure, but there's only so many places to buy electricity from
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.
If Israel can build an electrical grid connection to Greece then Ireland should have no problem building good connections with France and the UK.
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.
Your link is from a disreputable source though. Their literal purpose is to gaslight people.