In some way, As Pontes is in mourning. It has been 47 years watching how a gigantic chimney, taller than the Eiffel Tower (365 meters), relentlessly spit out the smoke from burning coal from the mine from which the livelihood of many families came since 1976. “It was the bread of the people for everyone,” summarizes a retired veteran of the plant, saddened by the closure of the center where he worked “all his life.”.

It was Endesa's largest thermal power plant on the Iberian Peninsula.. With 1,469 megawatts, it contributed more than 5% to the state energy system and also had the dubious honor of being one of the most polluting in Europe, according to CO2 emissions data from the EU and WWF.. For the majority of residents, pollution took a backseat because the plant was pulling employment and the regional economy..

Its closure was the chronicle of an announced death that the energy crisis of the Ukrainian war postponed for a few months as electrical insurance.. The thermal power plant was kept at half throttle, with two of the four groups turned on intermittently, to guarantee system availability, the Government justified.. Paradoxical, in the midst of the fight against climate change.

Early Thursday morning, the last stones of coal were consumed and the boiler went out. “Sadness,” summarized Ricardo Casas, president of the Endesa Committee. Its closure leaves the shadow of an industrial giant with five chimneys attached to an artificial lake printed on the horizon of As Pontes; which was generated by diverting water from the Eume River to flood the immense hole of the old brown lignite mine that closed on December 31, 2007.. The result is a sheet of fresh water 18 kilometers in perimeter with depths exceeding 200 meters and that has forever changed the environmental physiognomy of a mining town..

The definitive closure of the facility leaves several human problems. Part of the Endesa employees in As Pontes will be early retired or relocated to other centers on November 1. Another 25 will stay until the end of the year to “secure the facilities” before they are dismantled, the Committee explains.. “Everything that involves a fire load must be removed: fuels, coal, hydrogen.. Because there will no longer be activity or maintenance.”. Left in limbo are the 80 auxiliary industry workers and truck drivers who in the last 15 years were in charge of transporting imported coal from the port of Ferrol to the thermal power plant boilers.. “We have no solution other than to go to the fucking street,” explains Roberto, a subcontractor employee tired of hearing about an agreement for a just transition that does not allay his anxieties in the short term..

The service sector of As Pontes is also helpless: practically everything, from real estate agencies to gas stations, to the daily menu of the bars or the volume of work at its health center revolved around the activity derived from the plant. -and its staff- who were already in free fall, from the 1,800 employees that Endesa had on its payroll in 1987 to 256 in 2008. At the end of this month, there will be barely twenty left.

Another reading is made by Ecologistas en Acción, who always had the As Pontes plant on the radar “as the largest climate change factory” in Galicia and the northwest of the peninsula, and who celebrate the shutdown of the boilers. For the mayor of As Pontes, Valentín González Formoso (PSdeG), the shutdown of the boiler leaves a “bittersweet” feeling as a result of “the speculation of CO2 rights by 7 North American brokers that monopolize 70%,” he said, but it opens the door to other possibilities to continue being “an electrical industrial complex”.

And what will Endesa do in what was one of its homes in Galicia? “Endesa is neither leaving nor ignoring As Pontes and Galicia,” emphasizes the electricity company. It plans to “replace” the 1,400 megawatts of the thermal power plant that turned off its boilers with another 1,300 in renewable energy. It was already operating in parallel to the thermal plant with a combined cycle plant (800 Mw/hour of natural gas) and they have another 100 green hydrogen and several wind farms in perspective..

Goodbye, coal. Hello tires.

Called the Galician Springfield, due to its parallelism with the town of Simpson, the Endesa thermal power plant has marked the economy of the entire region for half a century.. Closed, the town of As Pontes has to reinvent itself. In addition to exploring wind and green hydrogen projects with Reganosa and EDP, the landing of Ence (the pulp multinational that requires a lot of water) is also being cleared and they have a large Chinese tire plant from Sentury Tire SL in perspective, with 531 million and 750 jobs taking advantage of the aid from the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan for the Just Transition.

Another multinational that has set its eyes on As Pontes is Ence pulp, which plans to occupy 45 hectares in the old coal park, investing 355 million euros for a bioplant for the recovery, development and production of recycled natural fibers from paper. and recovered cardboard that will generate 400 jobs. It would be necessary to add the H2 green hydrogen plant planned by Reganosa and EDPR, produced by electrolysis and necessary to guarantee the energy supply, to carry out the new industrial projects. It would occupy 35,000 square meters to generate a hundred direct and induced jobs.

The sum of the projects of the economic and social development plan that accompany the closure of the plant translate into a global investment of 2,682 million for 1,361 jobs. In As Pontes they wait impatiently for the commitment to go from promise to reality with the fireplace turned off forever.