Five days a week, a giant machine eats its way through soil at the Jaenschwalde open-cast mine in eastern Germany, exposing the brown coal buried beneath.
Lignite, as this form of compressed peat is known, is becoming an increasingly important part of Germany’s effort to phase out nuclear energy. It is also the reason Atterwasch, a village that survived the Thirty Years’ War, a Soviet onslaught at the end of World War II and four decades of communist rule is slated to be razed.
The village, with its volunteer fire station and old brownstone church, is to make way for a strip mine in the next decade. Dozens of other villages have fallen victim to the same fate, as coal once again becomes king.
The plan has many of Atterwasch’s 250 inhabitants up in arms.
“This is an ancient village,” long-time resident Monika Schulz-Hoepfner said.
Historical records first mention Atterwasch in 1294, and the house that Schulz-Hoepfner and her husband raised their three children in was built in 1740.
Vattenfall, one of Europe’s biggest energy companies, says the five open-cast lignite mines and three lignite power stations it operates in the Lusatia region near Berlin provide more than 33 000 jobs.
At least as important as the jobs is the energy that comes from the 60 million tons of lignite mined there each year. That is because Germany’s ambitious plan to shut down all its nuclear reactors by 2022 and dramatically ramp up the use of renewable sources —known as the “energy switchover” — requires coal as a stopgap.
“Lignite is part of the energy switchover because it offers a bridge to the time when, as is the goal in Germany, 80 or more percent of energy is generated by renewable means,” Vattenfall spokesperson Thoralf Schirmer said.
Last year, about one-quarter of the German gross electricity production came from lignite, according to the German Federal Statistics Office.
Vattenfall has recently outlined plans to sell the German lignite mines and power plants as a part of the Swedish company’s own drive toward renewable energy.
However, it is unlikely that the buyer of the plants would want to stop the mine expansion given the vast lignite deposits — estimated at hundreds of millions of tonnes — and potential profits to be made.
The current plan, approved years ago, is to remove Atterwasch and two other nearby villages by 2025 to make way for an expansion of the Jaenschwalde mine.
“We’re making a sacrifice that isn’t really necessary anymore,” Schulz-Hoepfner said. “I think it’s simply not legitimate to let old villages, which are part of our cultural heritage, fall into a coal hole anymore.”
She and others campaigning against the mine have not given up hope that the village will be saved and are appealing to the Brandenburg State Government for help.
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