Polish power plants consume 20 pct more coal in 2021
Polish power plants consumed over one fifth more coal to produce electricity in the first 10 months of the year compared to the same period of 2020, the Polish Mining Group (PGG) has reported.
PGG said in a Wednesday report that power plants burnt close to 6 million more tonnes of coal between January and October.
"An additional 1.6 million tonnes of coal will still have to be delivered by the end of the year," PGG added.
"There will be more than enough of the resource as mines are planning to extract 2.7 million tonnes in that time," the mining company said. However, there will be a bottleneck as Polish railway capacity is only 1.4 million tonnes for the same period, PGG said.
According to PGG, Polish mines extracted 44.5 million tonnes of coal in the first 10 months of the year and sold 48 million tonnes of the resource.
Power generation from coal has been rising in Poland since November 2020, and the annual growth has reached 21 percent since the start of 2021. At the same time, the country's electricity imports have fallen by 83.5 percent since January 2021.
In the pre-pandemic year of 2019, the Polish power generation industry consumed 36.1 million tonnes of coal. Estimates show the figure will be bigger by a few million tonnes this year.
