Coal use on the increase in Europe

Despite unanimous agreement that the levels of carbon emissions must be cut down the chief electricity generator in Italy, Enel, is transforming its oil-fired electricity generating facility to a coal-fired one. And in the next couple of years, the dependence on coal in Italy will rise from fourteen per cent to thirty three per cent. The dependence on coal alone by Enel will increase to fifty per cent.

A new report suggests that the same is being replicated in other European countries hugely influenced by the record high prices of natural gas and oil. In the next five years approximately fifty coal-fired facilities will be put up throughout Europe.

This trend is getting environmental groups worried. Protests have been witnessed in Civitavecchia, at the latest German coal-fired facility as well as at the Kingsnorth power station in Kent, which is will be newest coal-fired plant in the United Kingdom in over ten years.

The electricity generators argue that the new plants will be using clean coal which opponents say is not possible.

A leading climatologist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, James E. Hansen, has called for a moratorium to be imposed on coal and a phase out plan of the old plants laid out.

Through the emissions trading scheme, energy generators in Europe have to purchase permits for emissions but with record oil prices most power generators still see coal as being cheap even when the cost of permits has been considered.

But Stephan Singer, of the Brussels-based WWF energy and climate office of office WWF, counters that this is poor reasoning since the cost of coal and permits will definitely increase in the next ten years.

www.enel.com/en