The Romanian government faces strong opposition after a local environmental protection agency issued a permit allowing one of the country’s biggest, oldest and most polluting coal-based power-plants to function indefinitely.
Greenpeace Romania and the ClientEarth environmental law NGO announced on Wednesday that they have submitted a legal challenge to the lifetime permit granted to Rovinari power plant, situated in Gorj county in south-west Romania.
The NGOs said they filed a complaint asking the Gorj Environmental Protection Agency to cancel the permit it issued in September because the plant does not comply with new, tougher EU pollution laws and fails to consider the impact on public health and environment.
“It’s an administrative challenge, to the authority itself – they will have to issue a response to each of our legal grounds. And then, if they haven’t responded to all our grounds, we will look for a way to challenge the response through the court,” ClientEarth’s lawyer, Dominique Doyle, told BIRN.
The legal action might then bring the Romanian government to court if the local administration does not respond in full.
“Rovinari Power plant is a gigantic polluter and it’s been granted an indefinite permit, a lifetime permit, so there is no end in sight. So one needs to assess the impact of that pollution,” Doyle said.
She said that in 40 years since the plant started operating, there has never been a proper assessment study of its impact on public health or the natural environment.
For the activists, the most important goal is to keep the government under pressure to comply.
“Although it may take a long time to resolve, we really need to put pressure on these bodies to comply with environmental law, because they have the obligation to protect people. They have to know that they’ll be held accountable,” Doyle said.
A recent UN IPCC report confirmed that Europe needs a completely fossil-free energy system by 2030, but a large part of Europe’s energy system still relies on coal.
Rovinari Power plant is part of the Rovinari Energy Complex, administered by state-owned Oltenia Energy Complex. The plant, located near the town of Rovinari, is also surrounded by seven enormous lignite quarries that fuel it.
According to the Europe Beyond Coal NGO, Rovinari ranks 33 among the deadliest coal power plants in the European Union. The NGO attributed 142 premature deaths in the region in 2015 to the pollution emitted by the power plant.
Rovinari is also upstream from an EU nature protection site that contains dozens of threatened habitats and species.
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