The units that were launched yesterday will cover regional lines north of Hamburg /
“If plan A does not work out, then we will have to look for plan B”, announces the President of the Government at the start of his Ibero-American tour
It is a “priority” infrastructure to mitigate Europe’s dependence on Russian gas, and Spain, in the words of Pedro Sánchez, is “determined” to make it a reality. In Bogotá, the first stage of his Ibero-American mini-tour that will also take him to Ecuador and Honduras, the President of the Government assured that, if the MidCat gas pipeline is not completed, which would mean the interconnection of the Iberian Peninsula with France, his Executive will bet on materialize this initiative through Italy.
“If plan A does not go ahead, then plan B will have to be found. And plan B is the interconnection of the Iberian Peninsula with Italy,” Pedro Sánchez advanced at a press conference with his Colombian counterpart, Gustavo Petro. He recalled that, within the community project for the energy supply of the Twenty-seven -RePowerEU-, there is the Pyrenean interconnection of the Iberian Peninsula with France. “If it cannot be done due to domestic political difficulties -he added-, there is an alternative that is also included in the project, which is to interconnect Spain with Italy”.
He alluded, without expressly mentioning it, to Emmanuel Macron’s opposition to allowing the MidCat to pass through his territory. Last week, the French president made public his reluctance to this proposal, insistently demanded by Germany, the country most affected by the supply cuts with which Vladimir Putin maintains the pulse with Europe for his support of kyiv in the war. The French Executive defends his position with a double argument: the MidCat “would take a long time to be operational” and, “therefore, it would not respond to the current crisis”, and it would also be very expensive.
hydrogen trains
At this time of strong energy crisis, Germany has decided to accelerate its commitment to other alternative sources. Since yesterday, according to our correspondent, Juan Carlos Barrena, it has the first railway line in the world with trains powered exclusively by hydrogen for passenger transport. The commuter company of the Federal State of Lower Saxony LNVG put into operation a fleet of convoys with ‘clean’ engines to replace the diesel locomotives that until now circulated along the line of about one hundred kilometers that connects the towns of Cuxhaven, Bremerhaven, Bremervörde and Buxtehude, in the north of the country and near Hamburg.
It is a joint initiative of the Lower Saxony region and the French firm Alstom, which has been experimenting since 2018 with locomotives powered by this non-polluting fuel on that railway line on the North Sea coast. “This is a world first,” said Stefan Schrank, head of the project at Alstom.
At the presentation of the new trains, the Prime Minister of Lower Saxony, the Social Democrat Stephan Weil, highlighted the “exemplary character for the whole world” of the initiative. At a cost of 93 million euros, the first five convoys of the new ecological train have already come into operation, while the remaining nine to complete a fleet of fourteen will be delivered before the end of the year. They will supply as many other convoys that run on diesel.