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.
I haven’t visited west coast of Finland in years. It must be ”full” of wind turbines and they are building 70 new ones in the near future.
Finland once again putting the rest of us to shame.
Finland, Finland, Finland
You might say coal is…. Finnished. Don’t get up, I’ll see myself out.
Encore!!
I wish the rest of the world would do that. Instead, some of us, not naming any names here, are now trying to speed run climate change.
On the reasonable side of the balance sheet, Australia is moving so fast installing big batteries that CATL has named one of their products after the Australian company they’re supplying batteries to
Also we just had a study published and publicised for efficient pumped hydro locations near each population centre (though one state missed it and approved development of a pair of pumped hydro reservoirs in a location the study ranked poorly, leading to further advertising of the study and how its chosen site near the approved one would have been a tenth the cost)
Rooftop solar is so popular that grid demand in one of our two large cities was at an all time low recently
All in all it’s pretty promising here
Though just like America, a change in the party in charge can wreck a lot of the progress
Even if you don’t believe in climate change, closing coal plants is good. You don’t need years worth of data to see the smog go away.
But but my president said it’s good, creates jobs or something and and wind mills kills birds!
Meh, the politicians can say whatever they want. The Market talks a lot louder.
Coal production in the United States is down 60% from it’s peak in 2008 (1172 vs 526). In that same time frame Wind Power is up from 55 Tw/h to 425Tw/h and Solar Power is up from 864Gw/h to 164,502Gw/h.
We still have a long ways to go but there’s been massive changes in the last 15 years.
deleted by creator
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.
not fully sure on this but i think by “biomass” they mean peat, which is a controversial fuel.
Sort of, but not really. Peat accounted for 2.9% of its electricity generation in 2021 (page 14).
I can explain the delta. The article is referring to capacity. It’s a trick used by activists to overrepresent the contribution of renewables to the grid. Renewables are of course highly volatile and their peak capacity is much higher than trough. Grids require reliable base load generation, so little of the renewable peak capacity is actually useful or consumed. What’s important to measure is actual consumption, which your report measures.
*wipes single German tear*
Germany is on the same path while having the most industrialised economy in the EU.
Looking at this chart, the situation seems to be much better nowadays than I realized.
Don’t get too excited. AFAIK they are still burning peat for energy, which is worse than lignite (brown coal, the worst coal)
Fair, but according to that page, it was 3,4% of total consumption in 2020, 2,8% in 21-22 and 1,7% in 2023. So all in all, pretty good, I’d say. And over 92% of the energy they produce is low carbon or clean according to this
Better than most, I think
I know a common complain on the US worker side is where will those coal workers go for work. Followed by a large disgruntled crowd of folks with it. How are the Finnish workers that are not working there fairing with stuff like this? I’m curious to how their reactions are compared to that of the United States.
where will the coal workers get their black lung from now 🥺
This was a topic in 2016, where Trump was all over keeping the coal workers in jobs. How many coal workers does actually USA have? Go ahead, look it up. Also look up how many he saved.
When I last did, I found that there were about 40 000 people employed in coal related jobs in USA, and he didn’t save a single one of them. The coal employment decreased during his term and ever since.
Every year, there are more than 3 million people born in USA. All of those will need a job in 18-25 years or so. Every year, 3 million people will be looking for a job. If the unemployment queue is increased by all the 40k coal employees being laid off at once, you would hardly notice it in the statistics.
I also looked up the Finnish companies. They gradually laid off 400 people from 2022 until today based on the decision to stop the coal power plants. It’s completely neligable. They can easily do other jobs. Even in the same industry, just not coal.
The whole talking point is a nothing-burger.
Well, I can say that the job market in Finland is very rough right now and that unemployment is really at a high… so it’s not good. I don’t know about any strong opinions on coal workers
unemployment is high, I’m sure, but how’s the homelessness and lack of access to healthcare?
It’s been getting worse during the reign of the current right-wing government, as has everything else in the country. Homelessness was extremely low for the past at least 10 years due to the housing policy but is now rapidly on the rise these days. Access to healthcare in the Nordics is often criticised for being too slow (lack of staff), but objectively and relatively it’s not horrible.
