“We are ready to burn anything”: in the Czech Republic, the energy transition will wait

At the bottom of the open pit mine, a huge bucket excavator extracts brown coal like a giant insect stranded on lunar soil. In the distance, the cooling towers of two coal-fired power stations, the most polluting of fossil fuels, but which continues to provide 40% of Czech electricity production. We are at the castle of Jezery which overlooks the surroundings of the town of Most, the heart of the mining region of northern Bohemia. A landscape at Mad Max. In a few years, this 40 km2 crater will be flooded to turn it into a lake and an economic zone with, as a result, new jobs. But for the time being, production is on the rise once more, as in the neighboring mine of Vrsany, exploitable until around 2035 and owned by Pavel Tykac, an energy magnate domiciled in Prague and Saint-Moritz, in Graubünden. . His personal fortune, estimated by the magazine With 1.5 to 2 billion francs.