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.
World News
A community for discussing events around the World
Rules:
-
Rule 1: posts have the following requirements:
- Post news articles only
- Video links are NOT articles and will be removed.
- Title must match the article headline
- Not United States Internal News
- Recent (Past 30 Days)
- Screenshots/links to other social media sites (Twitter/X/Facebook/Youtube/reddit, etc.) are explicitly forbidden, as are link shorteners.
-
Rule 2: Do not copy the entire article into your post. The key points in 1-2 paragraphs is allowed (even encouraged!), but large segments of articles posted in the body will result in the post being removed. If you have to stop and think "Is this fair use?", it probably isn't. Archive links, especially the ones created on link submission, are absolutely allowed but those that avoid paywalls are not.
-
Rule 3: Opinions articles, or Articles based on misinformation/propaganda may be removed. Sources that have a Low or Very Low factual reporting rating or MBFC Credibility Rating may be removed.
-
Rule 4: Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, anti-religious, or ableist will be removed. “Ironic” prejudice is just prejudiced.
-
Posts and comments must abide by the lemmy.world terms of service UPDATED AS OF 10/19
-
Rule 5: Keep it civil. It's OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It's NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
-
Rule 6: Memes, spam, other low effort posting, reposts, misinformation, advocating violence, off-topic, trolling, offensive, regarding the moderators or meta in content may be removed at any time.
-
Rule 7: We didn't USED to need a rule about how many posts one could make in a day, then someone posted NINETEEN articles in a single day. Not comments, FULL ARTICLES. If you're posting more than say, 10 or so, consider going outside and touching grass. We reserve the right to limit over-posting so a single user does not dominate the front page.
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
Lemmy World Partners
News !news@lemmy.world
Politics !politics@lemmy.world
World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world
Recommendations
For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/
- Consider including the article’s mediabiasfactcheck.com/ link
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.
-
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.
-
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.
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)