The percentage of electricity Germany makes from coal has dropped significantly in recent years, but it still accounts for more than a quarter of the country's power supply
“All destroyed for coal,” said Eckhardt Heukamp, surveying the vast pit that drops away from the edge of his fields, 20 miles west of Cologne.More On This TopicA 56-year-old farmer, Heukamp is the last holdout in Lützerath, the next hamlet slated to be wiped away to allow more digging for coal to power German homes. He is fighting the forced expropriation of the 18th-century farmhouse his family has lived in for generations, which now lies just a few hundred yards from the mine’s edge.
“We want to be a front-runner on climate. We sell ourselves as this,” said Pao-Yu Oei, a professor in the economics of sustainable energy transition at the Europe University of Flensburg. “But for some very easy, simple things, we are not willing to take the sacrifice and basically take on our own lobby groups.”
“Germany has the technical means and they have the economic means and the financial means to sustain their electricity and energy system without having to destroy more villages,” said Oei.In western North-Rhine Westphalia, where Heukamp’s village of Lützerath lies, coal is ever-present. After coal there was exhausted, digging began on the other side of the autobahn at Garzweiler II in 2006, with plans to displace another dozen communities and thousands of residents. They have disappeared, one by one.Article content
Family graves had to be exhumed and relocated in the last village to be flattened for the mine. There is no longer any sign of the church that was pulled down despite its being a protected building. Treehouses dot a copse of trees between Heukamp’s farmhouse and the mine’s edge. A gully holds dozens of tents.
Germany’s 2038 goal appears increasingly out of step with Europe’s larger economies. Britain says it is phasing out coal by 2024, France by 2022 and Italy by 2025. “As a kid you were always thinking, to the left, there’s this hole,” she said. “And there is only sadness. It’s like you’ve been living next to nothing, and the nothing reaches you.”
Two-thirds have already sold, according to RWE letters posted to residents earlier this year, urging them to resettle, a process that has been ongoing for the past five years. The company says it aims to move the village residents together, in a process of “joint resettlement” that has “stood the test for decades now in preserving a village community.”
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