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.
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.