Lützerath (Reuters) - Massive police forces began clearing the occupied lignite village of Lützerath in North Rhine-Westphalia on Wednesday.

According to eyewitnesses, the officers advanced far into the village occupied by climate activists, which has become a symbol of the anti-coal movement. Scuffles broke out and police officers were sometimes met with stones and fireworks being thrown. Demonstrators formed human chains and blockades, which were broken up by the police. There were injuries, including police officers, said an Aachen police spokesperson. The officers are bracing themselves for a long operation. Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck defended the eviction and called for a renunciation of violence. Employees of the energy giant RWE, which wants to excavate brown coal from under the village, began to erect a fence around the village.

According to eyewitnesses, the police cleared paths into the hamlet, where they also removed activists from halls and the first houses. According to eyewitnesses, RWE employees sawed down Lützerath's village sign. Coal opponents have also entrenched themselves in tree houses there. According to a spokeswoman for the demonstrators, climate activist Greta Thunberg also wants to join the protests on Saturday. The eviction is a major challenge for the police, said a spokesperson. It is still unclear how long the operation will last. However, he expects it to take weeks.

The background to the eviction is a plan presented last October by Federal Economics Minister Habeck, NRW Economics Minister Mona Neubaur and RWE CEO Markus Krebber, according to which the phase-out of climate-damaging coal energy in NRW is to take place as early as 2030, eight years earlier than originally planned. In the short term, however, more coal is to be mined in view of the energy crisis following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. RWE emphasized that Lützerath would have to make way in order to meet demand and called on the occupiers to be non-violent. The energy giant now wants to erect a fence a good one and a half kilometers long around the site and the village is to be demolished.

Habeck defended the eviction. The compromise on which it is based creates more legal certainty in the west for the coal phase-out by 2030. "My political work is also aimed at achieving something similar elsewhere in Germany," continued the Federal Minister for Economic Affairs. "It is an agreement that serves climate protection." North Rhine-Westphalia's Environment Minister Oliver Krischer also backed the resolutions. "We have concluded an agreement with RWE that will lead to the open-cast mine being reduced by half," the Green politician said on Deutschlandfunk radio. The ministers, as well as a government spokesman, condemned violence against the emergency services.

RWE pointed out that coal mining was necessary in order to operate the lignite-fired power plants at high capacity and thus save gas in electricity generation. The original population of just under 100 in the small village had all been relocated. According to RWE calculations, the earlier closure of the coal-fired power plants in the Rhenish mining area will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by around 280 million tons. Lützerath would have to be used by RWE for lignite mining, NRW Economics Minister Neubaur admitted - "even if I would have wished it differently." The plans are controversial among the Green Party. The 2030 coal phase-out in the Rhineland coalfield agreed with RWE only received a narrow majority at a Green Party national conference in the fall. The Green Youth NRW described the evacuation of Lützerath on Wednesday morning as "fundamentally wrong". If the 1.5-degree limit of the Paris climate protection agreement is to be adhered to, coal must remain underground and Lützerath must be preserved.

(Report by Wolfgang Rattay, Petra Wischgoll, Matthias Inverardi, Tom Käckenhoff, Christian Krämer, Andreas Rinke and Riham Alkousaa; edited by Hans Seidenstücker; If you have any questions, please contact our editorial team at berlin.newsroom@thomsonreuters.com (for politics and the economy) or frankfurt.newsroom@thomsonreuters.com (for companies and markets)).