Guessing this is only for industry, but hopefully the knock on effect will be less use domestically. Having been in small town Ireland, the amount of pollution generated by home coal fires is crazy. It feels like stepping back to industrial revolution times, at 6pm when everyone lights up their fires is choke inducing.
It didn’t say in the article who the previous five were, so I looked it up:
- Belgium (2016)
- Austria (2020)
- Sweden (2020)
- Portugal (2021)
- United Kingdom (2024)
- Ireland (2025)
That’s using the source quoted in the article.
Another source has a longer list:
- Belarus (2015)
- Belgium (2016)
- Austria (2020)
- Sweden (2020)
- Portugal (2021)
- UK (2024)
- Slovakia (2024)
- (Ireland would be here if/when updated for 2025)
would be interesting to see the respective major power sources
thx.
- Belarus (2015; gas, nuclear)
- Belgium (2016; green, gas, nuclear)
- Austria (2020; green, bit of gas)
- Sweden (2020; green, nuclear)
- Portugal (2021; green, gas)
- UK (2024; green, gas)
- Slovakia (2024; nuclear, green, gas)
- Ireland (2025; green gas)
Most of the nations seem to use renewables and use gas to balance the load spikes. Few have the storage to get by without a source of balancing, nuclear is a common supplement but shouldn’t be capable of balancing since it’s so slow.
Some use so much gas it’s probably not just for balancing, namely the uk.
Sweden is probably using hydro to balance, they don’t seem to have any storage but also don’t use gas.
I would discard Slovakia. They still have installed coal capacity, and import significantly from poland which is mainly on coal.
sweden also has oil peaker plants, the largest ones in europe, but most of them are condemned. it’s mostly hydro. we did have pumped hydro for a while but that closed in the 80s due to bad economic viability (up until a year or so ago i was paying €0.02/kWh)
I can speak a bit on the UK as I live there.
The use of gas is for two things.
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Balancing against wind and solar, both of which can evaporate at certain times of year. Without more storage we’re left in a position where we basically need to be able to support 30GW of demand just on gas.
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Frequency stabilisation and cold start capability. We never seem to drop below 4GW of gas (or biomass - anything spinning mass) generation. Even if we had excess wind and solar, some gas will be burnt “just in case”.
Right now we need more storage, and better connections from the new sources of power (the coast for wind and international connectors) to the centres of demand (the cities). Power stations were historically located much closer to where the demand is, and our electricity grid is still shaped by that.
Today has been a good example. Lots of wind and sun but still 16% gas. We even switched some wind farms off today because we couldn’t get the power to where it was needed or a way to store it.
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Wow, and while they have 6 whole years of coal reserves left in their country. Very forward-thinking to switch to oil.
In contrast, the US has about 400 years of coal reserves.
(Yes, I know Ireland had been importing coal)
