this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2025
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Finland officially closes its last coal power plant, reduces reliance on coal for power generation below 1% four years ahead of schedule (www.openaccessgovernment.org)
submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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On April 1st, 2025, Finland officially closed the Salmisaari coal power plant in Helsinki, marking an essential moment in the country’s energy history

By doing this, Finland lowered its reliance on coal for power generation to below 1%, an achievement that reached four years ahead of schedule.

The closure is part of other efforts by the Finnish government to phase out coal completely by 2029, transitioning to cleaner and more sustainable energy sources, primarily wind power.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

As someone who very much wants to see wind and solar power, it's weird to me how much this article harps on about wind and nothing else. Not mentioned anywhere in the article is that expanding nuclear energy helped Finland considerably in its shift away from coal (page 3) and is its largest source of electricity (page 147), accounting for about 1/3 of its total electricity production (page 147). One of the other largest ways Finland has shifted to renewables in the last 20 years is biomass (page 20, page 82).

Finland has been rushing to add more wind, and that was seen as an important step to helping increase renewables in the energy mix (page 84), but as of 2022, it accounted for an extremely minimal portion of said energy mix (page 82). I would be interested to see how doubling the figure seen on page 87 where wind accounted for ~10% of renewables (not electricity generation in general, just renewables) from 2020 somehow made its share jump to 25% of all electricity production as the OP's article claims. I trust the IEA pretty firmly here.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Belated but:

  • "Energy" is not the same as "electricity", as the former includes a lot of thermic processes.
  • To some degree, it is to be expected that renewables make up a smallish share of primary energy consumption for a while longer--despite displacing large amounts of burning processes. As electrification and solar/wind/battery buildout continues, primary energy figures will go down while electricity figures will go up.
    • Wind/PV installations consume far smaller parts of the energy they produce for their own operation than coal/gas/nuclear plants do. The figures for plants that burn stuff are usually atrocious, especially for technologies like coal or nuclear where most of the plants are old (i.e., it's often a on the order of a third of the energy produced being lost to the environment right at the plant).
    • Heat pumps draw around 2/3 of their thermic energy from the environment for free, whereas anything that burns stuff loses some of the energy to the environment instead.
    • Electric cars use most of their energy for movement rather than acting as rolling boilers, i.e. you drive using 80% of the power rather than driving on somewhere between 20-30% of the power and otherwise generating a lot of heat.
  • Finally, looking at Electricity Maps, wind produced 2020: 8.7%, 2021: 9%, 2022: 13.36%, 2023: 16.7%, 2024: 22.4% of electricity. Generating around twice as much with around twice as much capacity seems fairly logical to me too. In addition, there are some yearly fluctuations too, i.e. if demand remained level and there were no further buildout, there might be years where the figure would drop below 20%. (Electricity Maps is not to be consumed without a generous heaping of small print when it comes to the CO2 numbers they produce but the generation/consumption numbers are good.)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

not fully sure on this but i think by "biomass" they mean peat, which is a controversial fuel.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago

Sort of, but not really. Peat accounted for 2.9% of its electricity generation in 2021 (page 14).