Several hundred people gathered Wednesday morning in front of the Cordemais coal-fired power station, about twenty kilometers from Nantes. The union intends to see the project aimed at switching the site towards biomass production succeed.
Both the union and the employees fear that EDF will deliberately increase the cost of the project to make it obsolete. The President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron, announced on September 24 that the last coal-fired power plants in France would be converted "completely" and "by 2027"to biomass, pellets primarily from wood waste. An announcement which reiterated one of its unfulfilled promises from 2017. The Cordemaias site is one of the last two coal-fired power plants still in operation, with the Saint-Avold plant, in Moselle. The gathering is an important moment; it is notably a question of showing political support for reconversion, said Gwenal Plagne, CGT secretary of the Central Social and Economic Committee (CSEC).