Greening Europe’s largest coal plant is doable, new report says

The Belchatow coal-fired power station in Poland.

Europe’s largest coal-fired power station, and sixth largest globally, has a number of alternatives to transition away from most of its lignite generation and the optimal one is to deploy up to 11 GW of wind and solar power capacity in the region, according to a new report.

Bloomberg Philanthropies and research group BloombergNEF (BNEF), in partnership with Forum Energii, today released a study into the feasibility of replacing lignite generation at the 5.1-GW Belchatow power station in the Lodz region of central Poland, where local lignite resources are likely to run out by 2036 at the latest. Not only is a transition to clean energy possible, according to the researchers, but it will also lower overall power system costs in the region.

Polish utility PGE Polska Grupa Energetyczna SA (WSE:PGE), which owns and operates the facility, has announced a plan to gradually shut down all units in the period 2030-2036. The report suggests three scenarios in which about 80% of the plant’s 2021 generation could be replaced with a variety of capacity mixes. The table below presents all three paths.

	"Optimal renewables"	"Land-constrained renewables"	"Renewables and SMR nuclear"
2030	3.3 GW Lignite 2.5 GW Solar 1.5 GW Wind	3.3 GW Lignite 2.5 GW Solar 1.5 GW Wind	3.3 GW Lignite 2.5 GW Solar 1.5 GW Wind
2036	5.7 GW Wind 5 GW Solar 1 GW Energy storage 0.1 GW Low-carbon CHP/thermal	3.6 GW Solar 2.9 GW Wind 1.5 GW Low-carbon CHP/thermal	5 GW Solar 4 GW Wind 0.6 GW SMR Nuclear 0.5 GW Energy storage

As shown above, between 6.4 GW and 10.7 GW of wind and solar with 1 GW-1.5 GW of firm capacity could do the job. However, the authors of the report stress that permitting restrictions for onshore wind projects must be dealt with in order for this plan to be realised.

“There are significant opportunities for renewable investment in the Lodz region. Belchatow could co-locate wind and solar repurposing the existing grid infrastructure. BloombergNEF analyzed historic weather patterns and found that solar and wind in the region often generate at different times, complementing each other,” said Felicia Aminoff, energy transition analyst at BNEF and lead author of the report.

Indeed, Poland is seeing substantial volumes of renewables, gas and nuclear energy be deployed and planned across the country right now but only 3% of that – 600 MW of solar and 100 MW of wind – is planned for the Belchatow area, according to the report. PGE is the company behind the plan unveiled in April 2021.

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