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Comment by cauliflower99 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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

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.

> 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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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...

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.

Ah yes, the Landman argument.

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

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.

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.

probably more like 15

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.

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

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

>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...?

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.

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.

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

So they are building new coal plants.

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

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.

> 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).

Not just all electricity markets. All markets. Why would you ever sell something cheaper than you know the buyer is willing to pay?

>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.

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/

> 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.

"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.

>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.

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

| 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...

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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

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...

Would any free market proponent like to chime in here? Why hasn’t this occurred?

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

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.

> 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.

... So then why isn't the solar to replace the more expensive plants getting built?

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

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.

>Snarky response deleted.

We appreciate your restraint.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

because you start internalizing costs

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.

> 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.

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.

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.)

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

Talk about ill informed.

Yes Ireland is rich.

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

Not according to your own source

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!

> 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.

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.

Iceland (geothermal) and Sweden (hydro + nuclear) comes knocking.

> 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.

> 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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

Easier to stockpile uranium than oil or gas though.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

> 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.

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-...

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.

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

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

Your emissions are dropping fast

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

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

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

> 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.

That's because we let all the industries go offshore, for the promises of Neoliberalism. That should never have happened either.

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

> 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.

Indonesia would be the obvious replacement - Indonesia is a pacific island nation (the islandiest) which exports a ton of coal.

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.

> 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.

A LNG terminal would help. Lots of bad infrastructure decisions have left us extremely exposed to those external shocks you mentioned.

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.

Europe was getting cheap gas from Russia. It makes a big difference, the US gas is much more expensive.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

An LNG terminal would make us more beholden to foreign powers.

> An LNG terminal would make us more beholden to foreign powers

This is a weird way to justify using LNG brought in through Britain.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

There's at least as much battery production of batteries in Ireland as there are viable coal mine sites.

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.

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.

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.

> 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 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)

> 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.

Even if all the solar panels in the world were recycled, you’ve barely scratched the surface of the points I made.

You haven't made any.

Unless you manufacture it locally, with a fully local supply chain, wind and solar are still susceptible to world events.

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.

You need tons of oil to lubricate wind turbines.

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.

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.

> 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.

Energy ≠ electricity

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

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.....

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.

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

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

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

Hard to see past the scientific consensus on global warming

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

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.

The longer we put off solving climate change, the more expensive it is going to be for the poor and middle-classes.

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

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.

What's your source for Irish coal energy being cheap!?

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.

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

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

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

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

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

BREAKING NEWS: China is big.

Cheap energy from coal is very expensive energy. Who’s going to clean up the pollution? Carbon capture uses a lot of energy

The bigger issue might be whether the transition is being managed in a way that protects consumers

Oof. That paints it in a different light. They arent investing in renewables?

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.

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.

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.

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.

In this thread: the rich, unaffected class instruct the poor that their plight is in fact a fabrication. History really does repeat itself.

Where was that coal coming from?

Look forward to the San Francisco upper class telling you how wrong you are about Irish energy and politics.

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.

Same thing is happening in Australia. This is what happens when you vote socialists into power.

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.

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/

Why not make the rich pay for this? They can afford it. You're taking your anger out on the wrong people.

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