Finland Set To Become First Country To Ban Coal Use For Energy (newscientist.com)

Finland could become the first country to ditch coal for good. As part of a new energy and climate strategy due to be announced tomorrow, the government is considering banning the burning of coal for energy by 2030. From a New Scientist article: "Basically, coal would disappear from the Finnish market," says Peter Lund, a researcher at Aalto University, and chair of the energy programme at the European Academies' Science Advisory Council. The groundwork for the ban already seems to be in place. Coal use has been steadily declining in Finland since 2011, and the nation heavily invested in renewable energy in 2012, leading to a near doubling of wind power capacity the following year. It also poured a further $85 million into renewable power this past February. On top of this, Nordic energy prices, with the exception of coal, have been dropping since 2010. As a result of such changes, coal-fired power plants are being mothballed and shut all over Finland, leaving coal providing only 8 per cent of the nation's energy.

Comments

Second to announce being first.

[PsychoSlashDot]

Canada announced this three days ago... here on Slashdot.

Maybe Finland will be doing it earlier in 2030 than Canada. Don't know. Now I'm wondering how many other countries are going to be first.

Re: The priesthood has spoken

[Jzanu]

What evidence? Show documented and peer-reviewed and published scientific articles with authors working in their fields of expertise.

Re:Will these small countries matter?

[Jzanu]

Except " China alone is responsible for 40% of global renewable power growth" in 2015, with the caveat "that represents only half of the country’s electricity demand increase."

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[Sique]

I can be certain that at least the glaciers nearby are receding. I can actually see them from my home. And I live in a region which has continuous weather data since the first half of the 18th century. So I know that the temperatures have already risen about 2 degrees Celsius here around on average. And I can tell that at least some glaciers are at their lowest level since 5200 years because of the discovery of the Oetzi, who was covered by ice for more than 5000 years until the glacier receded. Oetzi was discovered just 50 miles away from my home.

So that's how I know that the glaciers I know of are receding: By actually going there and looking at them.

Only one way forward

[Kiuas]

To replace coal, we're building more nuclear. There's one new reactor being built (actually the biggest in the world at 1700 MW, although the project has been seriously delayed and is unfortunately massively over budget/schedule due to problems with the French contractor (Areva) and one additional reactor being planned for 2024. If both of these are successfully completed, it will more than double our nuclear capabilities and increase our energy production capabilities by almost 3000 MW. and should be more than enough to make up for the gap left by abandoning coal.

I'm a fan of nuclear, especially since we're also building the first ever deep geological repository to handle the waste storage. It's just a shame that the project has turned out to be such a screw.up (granted it is partially because the reacrtor type - European Pressurized Reactor - is new and has never been built before), and I'm hoping the authorities here learn something important from this: bidding these types of projects based solely on the price-tag will lead to issues. I do believe though that Areva will end up paying the fees once the case is settled, though whether or not it will actually have the money to do so (it's over 5 billion) is another matter.

Regardless of the difficulties and the cost, nuclear is really the only way forward for us, because we're pretty much tapped out on Hydro and solar doesn't have much use here at commercial scales because for half the year the sun is pretty much gone. So if we want to be rational and dump both coal and the dependency on Russian import gas, going nuclear with modern is the only viable option at this point.

Germany has gone the opposite direction and is shutting down nuclear power plants which is actually leading to an increase in the use of fossil fuels. Here's a TED talk about why the senseless opposition to nuclear is actually harming the environment because of that.