Italy to Keep Coal Power Stations Open for Another Decade
Italy has delayed its plan to close its coal-fired power stations by more than a decade as the Iran war drives up oil and gas prices
The Telegraph has the story:
In a significant reversal, the country will now continue to burn coal in at least one, and possibly up to three, power generation plants until 2038.
Italy’s move comes as countries around the world, including Japan, South Korea and Germany, are turning back to coal to alleviate the spiralling energy crisis.
Italy had planned to be one of the first countries in mainland Europe to phase out coal, with a deadline of 2025 to shutter all its coal-fired power plants and replace them with gas.
Successive Italian governments have retired 5,810 megawatts (MW) of coal-fired capacity since the turn of the century.
With just three plants still operating last year, coal was responsible for less than two percent of the country’s energy mix, according to the International Energy Agency. The vast majority of electricity came from oil and gas.
Giorgia Meloni, the Italian Prime Minister, watered down the coal phase-out two years ago, saying technical problems meant the Sulcis coal-fired plant, on the island of Sardinia, would have to remain open until 2028.
The Government then decided to mothball Italy’s last remaining mainland plants, which have a combined capacity of 3,960MW, rather than close them altogether.
To switch them back on, however, the Government would need to request new EU permits to burn coal. It will also need to decide whether to use the two plants as ‘cold reserves’, which are turned on only when needed, or whether to go for a full restart.
Italy’s move means that nine of the 30 European countries that use or have used coal power now have a phase-out deadline beyond 2030, according to the website Beyond Fossil Fuels.
Another nine still have a pre-2030 deadline, as Italy used to, while six have not set any target.
Britain is among the half-dozen countries that have already closed all their coal-fired power plants, shuttering the last ones in 2024.
The German Government, which has a 2038 target, has prepared a law that could bring 6.5 gigawatts of reserve coal capacity back into service if the crisis drags on.
“We may need to keep our coal plants online for longer,” Friedrich Merz, the German Chancellor, said last week. “I am not ready to gamble with the core of our energy supply just because we agreed on some deadlines years ago.”
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