A petition has surfaced on the Facebook feeds of many throughout Croatia urging signatures to stop the construction of the thermoelectric power plant on Peruća Lake located in inland Dalmatia.
The petition was released on February 21, 2017 and reads:
“The planned project VisViva will construct a thermoelectric power plant on Peruća lake. The construction of the power plant would be geo-strategic suicide. Economically speaking, the plant would be the robbery of Croatian citizens, and environmentally speaking, the project would be the ecocide of the river Cetina, Peruća lake, and the Cetina region.
The thermal power plant would be built on Peruća because it can be cooled with water from Peruća lake. Because of that, Peruća lake and the Cetina would be heated, resulting in death for all life in the river Cetina and Peruća lake.
In addition, the power plant on the Cetina and Peruća would release 280,000 gallons of wastewater with hazardous chemicals, acid or alkaline each day, with over 2 million kilograms of exhaust gas per hour (or about 620 kilograms per second) in the air.
The location of the power plant would be built near the Peruća dam which has constant daily winds in the summer and potential showers that would be ‘ideal’ carriers of pollution to water and soil, not only all over the Cetina landscape, but also to the surrounding areas of Split.
These plants close around the world because they are not profitable, as is evidenced by the list of some of the closed gas power plants on the bottom of this text. The power plant would be cost-effective for Croatia as the new law of 2015 guarantees reliable energy producers much higher purchase prices than on the market, and we as citizens would pay for that through the higher cost of electrical bills.
Finally, the location of the power plant is at the center of one of the largest geostrategic potentials for Croatia. The Cetina and Peruća are the largest facilities of drinking water in Croatia (and amongst the largest in Europe), and the plateau Dinara and Svilaja are of the greatest potential for renewable energy sources (wind and sun). Energy and water are two basic resources for geostrategy in the 21st century! If the power plant is built, water from the river Cetina and Peruća lake will not be drinkable, and it will destroy one of the most valuable natural resources.
Therefore, the citizens of the Cetina region and several experts (physicists, electrical and mechanical engineers) have rebelled against this project and have given the public clear and technical arguments against the power plant.
You can sign this petition to help stop this megalomaniac project and thus save the Cetina River, the wildlife therein, and the lives of people in the Cetina, as well as 500,000 inhabitants of Split-Dalmatia county who drink from the Cetina river. “
The petition is addressed along with a letter to Andrej Plenković, Prime Minister of Croatia. Thus far, the petition has reached just over 3,000 of the 5,000 signatures required.
You can sign the petition HERE.
