WWF said most of the aging “Dirty Thirty“ will have to be replaced in the next 20 years, but energy companies such as RWE AG and Vattenfall seem to be choosing new coal generators to take over from old ones instead of switching to low-carbon power.
It ranked
The worst was a Greek plant at Agios Dimitrios, followed by another Greek site at Kardia and a German station at Niederaussern.
The top 10 polluters all run on lignite, or brown coal, a cheap power source mined in
“Most of the utilities in
Seven out of 10 of
The European Union this spring set a binding target for all 27 member nations to cut their carbon dioxide releases by 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2020, urging countries to use less power and switch to more renewable sources such as wind and solar power.
The aim is to limit global warming to no more than 2 C above current temperatures.
Singer said power companies could make an important contribution to these CO2 targets by switching over the major polluting power stations to a mix of other energy sources such as natural gas and renewables.
“If you deal with a couple of the big installations, you do part of the job very easily,“ he said. “If you replace them with a decent mix of technologies, you can bring emissions down quite rapidly.“
Coal is a cheap and relatively plentiful power source, but it releases far more carbon dioxide than burning natural gas. But to some, it offers a more reliable European alternative to imported--and more expensive--natural gas piped from
PIN/AP
Your Comment