Poland's largest power company Polska Grupa Energetyczna (PGE) is finding it harder to source financing for coal-fired generation projects, Magdalena Bartos, daily Rzeczpospolita reported Friday company chief financial officer Magdalena Bartos as saying.
"We're already receiving more and more signals from investment banks that they are not interested in lending money for such projects. This trend will intensify," she was quoted as saying.
Dutch bank ING became last month the latest to announce its withdrawal from financing new coal power and mining investments.
PGE is heavily reliant on coal. In the first three quarters of this year, it generated 92% of its 41.73 TWh of electricity from lignite and hard coal-fired plants.
It is building new coal plant too, including two 900 MW units at its hard coal-fired Opole plant and a 450 MW unit at its lignite-fired Turow plant.
The company is also planning two investments to exploit new large lignite deposits in Zloczew and Gubin with adjacent power plants in the next decade.
But Bartos said Polish generators are thinking of investing in cleaner generation technology.
"The question however is will this happen from one day to the next, which will be expensive and painful, or rather on the basis of a long-term strategy, thanks to which significant costs will be avoided," she said.
International negotiators are nearing the mid-point of two weeks of crunch talks in Paris to try to thrash out a new global deal to curb carbon emissions blamed for changing the climate, of which coal is the main culprit.
