Germany Plans to Raze Towns for Brown Coal and Cheap Energy

Germany Plans to Raze Towns for Brown Coal and Cheap Energy
Villages face the bulldozer as one of Europe’s renewable energy leaders leans more heavily on an old habit.


Giant machines dig for brown coal, or lignite, at Vattenfall's mining operation near Jänschwalde, Germany, in the Lausitz region. Its planned expansion could force relocation of towns.
PHOTOGRAPH BY PATRICK PLEUL, DPA/CORBIS

Andrew Curry in Atterwasch, Germany for National Geographic
PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 11, 2014

The German village of Atterwasch is tiny, its single street lined with sturdy brick and stone houses. The village has a single church whose bells peal out at noon each day, a small volunteer fire department, and a cemetery with a special section devoted to German soldiers who died nearby in the closing months of World War II.

Atterwasch may soon be gone.

Vattenfall, a Swedish energy company, hopes to relocate the village and its residents in order to strip-mine the ground underneath for lignite, or "brown coal."

"They would tear everything down, dig up the cemetery, blow up the church and cut down all the trees," said Christian Huschga, a screenwriter and father of two who has lived in Atterwasch for more than 30 years.

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Yet those in Atterwasch, and environmentalists elsewhere, blame not nuclear's pending demise but brown coal's political clout in the region and around Germany. Because of the way Europe's energy market works, brown coal remains much cheaper here than natural gas, an alternative that produces lower carbon dioxide emissions. While nuclear energy indeed has declined in Germany 10 percent since 2011, natural gas power is down 23 percent. Coal power is up 9 percent, and electricity production overall is up 3 percent.

The plans to plow Atterwasch under, and relocate its 900 people, in fact, have been in the works since 2007, before Fukushima sealed the fate of Germany's nuclear power industry. "The connection between the nuclear phase-out and the phase-out of coal is not there," said Stefan Schurig, climate and energy department director at Hamburg's World Future Council, a think tank devoted to sustainability issues. "The resistance of the coal industry is massive."

Brown Coal Jobs

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5. Introduction of nuclear power as a set with coal-fired power generation
The theory of introducing nuclear power generation to reduce the number of coal thermal power plants seems to be too naïve a thought, in the political sense. In reality, nuclear power plants and coal thermal power plants were built and introduced in Japan simultaneously. For us, nuclear power and coal thermal power have been considered as a set, with coal thermal power acting as a back-up system in case of reduced operations at nuclear power plants. Consequently, Japan has consistently increased the number of coal thermal power plants, while promoting nuclear power generation, resulting in the eventual increase in CO2 emissions.

The most important reason for this is the fact that stakeholders promoting nuclear power plants are the same as those promoting coal thermal power plants, i.e., economic bureaucrats, power generation companies, major heavy equipment manufacturers, and energy intensive industries. As they are in a mutually beneficial relationship, they share strong economic incentives to build a massive centralized power generation system and to maximize their fixed assets and electricity sales. Therefore, these stakeholders are inclined to be less enthusiastic to introduce energy-saving measures and renewable energy. In Japan, the Government and other stakeholders intentionally advocated for a trade-off relationship between nuclear power generation and climate change measures. Climate change measures are “used” to promote nuclear power generation. Many Japanese people have eventually accepted such an idea.

The conclusion in Japan is that, in order to reduce the number of coal thermal power plants, it is essential to reform the structure of industry and interests through denuclearization. Moreover, it is our belief that such events and situations are not things limited to Japan, but will happen in any country of similar industrial structure and at a similar stage of economic development.