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:Second to announce being first.

[Jzanu]

The better question is: Which country will be last? The last to protect the health of their residents, the slowest to adapt, the slowest at actually growing their economy.

Re:Second to announce being first.

[mspohr]

At the recent Climate Change Conference in Marrakesh, 43 of the developing nations most threatened by climate change – who together form the Climate Vulnerable Forum – committed to transitioning to 100% Renewable Energy.
Don't know how many of these are using coal now but they certainly won't be adding coal and will be phasing it out what they have.

Re:Second to announce being first.

[dbIII]

Also, with the greatest possible respect (watch "Yes Minister" for why I used that phrase), coal production costs are incredibly low as it is (due to a lot of automation) and wage costs are a tiny percentage of the total costs.
I'm sure you are good are something but the above post is more than a little embarrassing, especially the crack about unions when wages of miners are set by enterprise agreements these days.

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[MightyMartian]

Poor little delicate snowflake. I'm so sorry the laws of physics don't line up with your world view. Why don't you go have a big ol' cry, poor little alt-right denier snowflake

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[MrL0G1C]

"the lack of evidence for global warming"

So why is the north pole ice melting, why are the glaciers clearly receding.

Do you also deny that it gets hot in green houses,
Do you deny that mankind releases billions of tons of CO2?
Do you deny that CO2 is a greenhouse gas?

Tell me, which is it?

Re:Political Gamesmanship Of The Moment

[sit1963nz]

http://www.nrel.gov/news/featu... The wind turbines in Antartica seem to be going OK and its a lot colder there.

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."

Maybe first to ban

[Traxton]

But the neighbour countries Norway and Sweden haven't used coal in decades. For electricity generation, Norway is basically 100% hydro and Sweden is 45% hydro, 40% nuclear and 15% wind, solar, woodburning and minor natgas. Pressure from Denmark forced Sweden to shut down their most southern nuclear plant, so a small natgas plant had to be built(2 TWh of the total 160 TWh generated). The natgas is bought from... Denmark.

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.

Re:The priesthood has spoken

[Bongo]

Hah. Given most people are simply not interested in climate change, this is all moot. [1]

But seeing as this is Slashdot, and a Friday, the thing is, most "climate change deniers" don't have an issue with any of those points. CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and mankind releases CO2, and greenhouses do indeed get hot (why this last one is on the list is beyond me, as "greenhouse" is just an analogy here).

The point which EVERYBODY is up in arms about, is how much warming will actually come from feedbacks, and not from CO2 itself.

The mainstream respectable "in the field" "non-denialist" expert view is that the feedbacks could give you 4 or even oh I dunno as it is a feedback who can say where it would stop maybe 8C for all we know... and the denialist view is that this is ludicrous as why didn't the Earth just accidentally cook itself already.

The science issues are really all about feedbacks, not "basic physics". And the people and politics issues are really all about values. [2]

[1] So much for superordinate goals which could appeal to the different values systems of the global population.

[2] Human beings grow through about 6 or 7 major stages of worldview, each with its own values-system. This is why everyone is usually quite sure that their own way of looking at the world is the "right" way. Climate change isn't just science. Climate change is often really about trying to get the world to adopt a particular values-system. (And then when this values-system gets rejected by people, we end up thinking about them as "selfish", "consumerist", etc.) And in many ways climate change is about bringing forward a better set of values for the world. But because nobody seems to know that values cannot simply be imposed, like how you can't impose democracy on Iraq by bombing the old regime out of office, ie. because people actually grow through values in a particular way, in an organic, life experience kind of way, and cannot be made to change, even if the planet is burning or whatever, then the fact remains, most of the world does not care about climate change, because the way climate change is framed, it is all about a particular set of values, and most people are not at that stage of values. They just aren't. And if climate change proponents would stop being so narrow minded, they might see that. Someone somewhere made a huge blunder in trying to tie a new values system to a science theory (theory in the strong sense of the word). The values system should have been made subject of philosophy and ethics and even religion. But no, it was tied to a science theory, as if "reality" would force you to change how you value things. Which is just not how human beings work. So climate change will fail. It has been failing. It'll continue to fail. It'll really not be going anywhere, it is so failed (you Americans seem to like this kind of phrasing!) But as I say, this is Slashdot and a Friday, so who cares anyway.

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.