It is shortly after five o'clock in the morning when the heavy personnel carrier struggles forward in the dark. Through deep mud, he brings two dozen women and men from the morning shift to the Nochten opencast mine in Lusatia. The first stop is at the F60 conveyor bridge, a 13,000-ton steel monster that clears the overburden above the lignite seam. The bridge is considered the world's largest open-cast mining machine and has been in operation for 50 years, reports the workforce not without pride. Up three steep lattice stairs we go to Petra Sobania, which stands in a kind of surveillance room. "This is the control room," she says. "This is where all the nerves of the bridge converge." On six monitors in front of her, she has all the systems of the bridge in view, the screens above show live images of the conveyor belts over which the overburden is deposited.
Stefan Locke
Correspondent for Saxony and Thuringia based in Dresden.
- Follow I follow
Sobania comes from Hoyerswerda and has been working "in coal" for 40 years. In the GDR, she trained as a machinist for large-scale opencast mining equipment and worked her way up to the position of control room operator. Under its bridge, at a depth of eighty meters, stand the comparatively small-looking but still powerful lignite excavators. In the dark, they look like illuminated dinosaurs nibbling the approximately twelve-metre-thick seam both above and below. The coal then lands on a no less large conveyor belt, which transports it over several kilometers to the Boxberg power plant. His hunger has suddenly become very great in the past year.
Too suddenly also for the coal miners, admits the workforce. For the first time ever – also because of non-postponable conversions – they would not have been able to deliver as much coal as was needed. "That really hurt the miner's honour," says Philipp Nellessen, who is responsible for mining at Lausitzer Energie Kraftwerke AG, or Leag for short. "Something like that definitely won't happen to us this year. The power plants are crying out for coal." What sounds paradoxical in view of the decision to phase out lignite is reality here: In 2022, the growing demand for energy, especially in industry and transport, came together with gas shortages and the shutdown of nuclear power plants. Since then, the coal-fired power plants in Lusatia, which were once down-regulated, have been running at full capacity again. Units that had already been shut down and served as reserves were also brought back to the grid.
One-third more lignite extracted from the ground than planned
A good third more lignite than planned they had taken out of the ground last year, said Nellesen. More than at any time in 15 years. Demand is also having an impact on the workforce: a thousand new employees were hired in 2022, in all areas. Of the 76 trainees who had been trained, almost 70 remained with the company at the same time. Word has already gotten around: While not all apprenticeships could be filled three years ago, this time the places were gone as quickly as they had not been for a long time.
On the horizon above the edge of the opencast mine, a waxy red stripe is now visible, while some employees cross the conveyor bridge with Saxony's Prime Minister Michael Kretschmer (CDU). So they run a good 500 meters over the opencast mine towards the rising sun. Kretschmer, who comes from Lusatia, wants to get an idea of the situation on this ice-cold morning and give the workers confidence. "Without lignite, everything is nothing," says the CDU politician and then repeats what he has been demanding for months: The exit year 2038 should not be shaken. "I stand by the lignite phase-out," says Kretschmer. "But we have to stop constantly fighting new battles about it." The pledges painstakingly won in a compromise must be kept.
The workforce nods. The fact that Federal Minister of Economics Robert Habeck repeatedly brings the year 2030 into play for the phase-out upsets pretty much everyone here. "Who is stopping this man?" shouts an employee. But it's not just about Habeck. The Green parliamentary group is also thinking about the year 2030. In opencast mining, it is said that nothing has yet been achieved in the structural change – i.e. in the state-guaranteed compensation for the loss of coal jobs – and that new goals are already being defined. Politics, as most in Nochten feel, acts "ideologically shaped and without expertise". The fact that renewable energies cannot be so far off can be seen from the fact that they suddenly have more work here again. However, people are not only concerned about jobs, but also about a future for the region. "I'm 48, and the youngest in my street," says a man from Weißwasser, the nearby former district town, which has lost a good 20,000 of its once 38,000 inhabitants since reunification. "Don't shut us down before there's something new!"