The government had announced at the end of June its temporary reopening during the winter, due to tensions in the energy supply.
MO12345lemonde with AFP
She only reopens a few months after closing. The Emile-Huchet coal power plant, located in Saint-Avold, in Moselle, was to close its doors in March. Due to the energy crisis, the government had however announced at the end of June its temporary reopening during the winter. The site therefore started producing electricity on Monday, November 28, said the site director, Philippe Lenglart.
If the fall temperatures were until then relatively soft, the latter are now “seasonal”. This is why “we were called to produce since 9 am this morning,” said Lenglart to the France-Presse agency.
to feed up to a third of the homes of the Grand-Est region
Large issuer of co 2 , the Emile-Huchet central is one of the last two of the French park to operate on coal, with that of Cordemais, in Loire-Atlantique. In the spring, the government did not exclude restarting the Mosellan site “as a precaution” to secure the supply of the country with electricity, given the breakup of the conflict in Ukraine and the setbacks encountered by the French nuclear park. This dynamic was embraced by other member countries of the European Union, in the midst of energy crisis.
At the end of June, the Ministry of Ecological Transition had specified that it was a restart which “is part of the closing plan” of the site, recalling that the commitment of Emmanuel Macron to close all of the coal-fired power plants in France remained “unchanged”.
The purchasing power law passed at the beginning of August by Parliament included a measure allowing the company manager of the site, Gazelenergie, to rehire employees this winter. Until then, more than half had to retire, and the youngest had to be reclassified in the new projects of the company. The energy supplier provides, among other things, to build a biomass boiler instead of the coal -fired power plant.
In total, it will take more than 500,000 tonnes of coal to run the site until the end of March. When it operates at full capacity, the latter produces up to 600 megawattheures and can feed a third of households in the Grand-Est region.
More than 6, 7 % of the electricity produced by the country is of nuclear origin, the share of fossil fuels having been in 2020 of 7.5 %, including 0.3 % of coal and 6.9 % gas.