Croatia Greenpeace, Green Action and Green Istria reported, referring to the data of Greenpeace in South Korea, that the Korean company KOSEP gave up investments in a power plant Plomin C. KOSEP is one of four companies that HEP has chosen as a potential strategic partners a year ago, to build a power plant Plomin C, but after the Polish company POL-MOT gave up earlier this year, there are only two companies in the game now, French EDISON and Japanese Marubeni, announced the eco associations.
The two companies, according to the associations, have the deadline until end of October to send to HEP mandatory bids for the construction of Plomin C.
Information on the withdrawal of investment in Plomin C, gave the deputy director in the department of innovation and new business of KOSEP to Greenpeace representative office in South Korea, Daul Yang, said the eco associations.
They find that building a power plant is a project which is not profitable, for which most investors have no interest.
They recall that the European Union has a target until 2050 to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by 80 to 95 percent.
In the case of the construction, Plomin C would be in operation until about 2065, and Croatia would therefore substantially exceed permitted levels of emissions and should therefore pay expensive penalties, conclude the associations.
Eco associations invited the Croatian government, as the owner of HEP, to make a shift in politics and give up of Plomin C, and to invest significantly more resources to increase energy efficiency and use of renewable energy.
They warn that Greenpeace, using the methodology of the European Environment Agency, made an analysis of the external costs of the project, which estimated that Plomin C will result with an about 680 premature deaths in 40 years and that the external costs of pollution would reach almost 125 MEUR a year.
“Given that Croatia no longer has its own coalfields, Plomin C leads us to the energy dependence on imported coal,” said associations. According to them, the project is inconsistent with the regional plan of Istria, while on the global level it is contributing to climate change.
They remind us that there is a court case against the Ministry of Environment and Nature Protection based on claim of Green Action and Green Istria, due to the issuance of the environmental permit for the “damaging project.”
Commenting on the analysis of Greenpeace, after which Plomin C construction will cause great difficulties and increasing the number of deaths, the Minister of Environment and Nature Mihael Zmajlovic said in May that if forced to choose between coal or gas as an energy source – he would always choose gas, but when specifically talking about Plomin C, the only rational solution is to use coal with modern technology.
As regards of the selected technology for Plomin C, HEP reported in late August that the development of the project solution considered all the relevant clean coal technologies, so the selected coal dust technology with supercritical steam has largest commercial presence and high reliability of the existing facilities of that type, because of its high energy level of action.
Source; Serbia Energy See desk
