Austria to reopen closed coal power station despite climate goals

Austria is making ready to reopen a coal-fired energy station that closed in 2020, over fears of Russian gasoline provides being lower as a result of struggle in Ukraine.

The EU imposed sanctions towards Moscow after it began the battle and European international locations at the moment are making ready for retaliation from the Kremlin in relation to vitality imports.

In response to Christof Kurzmann-Friedl, a website supervisor on the energy plant, each possibility is required proper now to scale back the impression.

“We’re making ready ourselves for the truth that we’ll now not have the identical certainty of gasoline stream that we now have grow to be accustomed to lately and many years, and that each contribution that may be made to interchange using gasoline will probably be known as upon,” Kurzmann-Friedl mentioned. “Coal is a specific risk, let’s put it that approach, and will assist scale back gasoline consumption.”

Nevertheless, the EU has main ambitions to scale back carbon emissions, together with a pledge to grow to be carbon impartial by 2050 and restarting using coal is a serious setback for the bloc’s targets.

And Austria is just not the one member state making ready to as soon as once more use its coal-fired energy crops. 

Germany and France have made related bulletins, placing at additional threat one other of the EU’s local weather targets – decreasing its greenhouse gasoline emissions by no less than 55% by 2030. 

For Geneviève Pons, from the Jacques Delors Institute, the battle in Ukraine and its financial and vitality penalties are a severe risk to all of this.

“It’s fairly stunning that we’re permitting ourselves to come back again to reopening energy stations which are twice as polluting as gasoline energy stations,” Pons advised Euronews. “We’re permitting ourselves to do that relatively than pleading for a discount in consumption and pleading in a extremely very energetic approach, i.e. by finishing up public campaigns as we did up to now.”

For environmentalists, the struggle in Ukraine should not be used as an excuse to name the Inexperienced Pact into query.

They are saying the alternative – that it ought to push member states to behave extra shortly.