The Saint-Avold power plant (Moselle), one of the two coal-fired sites in France, resumed service on Tuesday to meet electricity production needs as the cold arrives, we learned from its operator GazelEnergie. Confirming information from franceinfo, Camille Jaffrelo, spokesperson for GazelEnergie, toldAFP that production had resumed on Tuesday morning, when the annual UN climate conference (COP29) had just opened in Baku.
Coal burning is considered one of the main causes of global warming. The Emile-Huchet power station restarts in winter, when the cold sets in and the system is under tension. Operating on average around twenty days per year, the plant closed at the beginning of 2022, but was called upon a year later, in January 2023, to secure the country's supply in a context of energy tension.
Since then, around a hundred employees and more than 150 subcontractors still work there, but coal must definitively be abandoned by 2027 in accordance with a declaration by Emmanuel Macron in September 2023. To do this, the plant is preparing its reconversion , with a biomass project initially, but also with a gas project.
The Minister for Energy Olga Givernet, however, expressed reservations on Tuesday about this conversion to gas. “To give prospects, we must move towards carbon-free energies. Gas is not. If we use biogas, it's much better. Biomass is also a possibility, but the copy must first be solid, which is not the case,” she said on BFM Business.
“The project has been on the table for weeks and it is solid, more than solid,” he insisted to theAFP Thomas About, CFDT union delegate at the plant, believing that the longer the government “waits, procrastinates, the more coal we will burn”.
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