Finland officially closes its last coal power plant
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On April 1st, Finland officially closed the Salmisaari coal power plant, marking an essential moment in the country's energy history

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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.

  • federal reverse@feddit.orgMEnglish
    1·
    3 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.)