German power giant RWE and Europe's top coal producer, Poland's Kompania Weglowa, announced Wednesday that they planned to open a 1.5-billion-euro (2.1-billion-dollar) power plant in southern Poland.

The two groups said they had created a joint venture under the label RWE Elektrownia Czeczot in which RWE holds a 75-percent stake.

The remainder belongs to Kompania Weglowa which has also provided the site for the plant at the mothballed Czeczot mine near Pszczyna, shut down in 2005.

Construction of the 800-megawatt plant is expected to begin in 2013 and be completed within two years.

Germany, preparing to stop using nuclear power by 2020, has not opted to boost the role of coal which has a bad press there because of pollution concerns.

Coal is still king in Poland, however, where it generates 94 percent of the country's electricity.

Kompania Weglowa chief Miroslaw Kugiel said the RWE deal showed that coal still has a future and insisted the new power station would be a far cleaner option than older plants.

Each year Poland churns out almost twice the EU average in carbon dioxide, by far the main culprit among the greenhouses gases that contribute to global warming.

The government has said it plans to build Poland's first nuclear power station by 2020 but with more than a 100 years' worth of reserves, experts predict coal will remain Poland's dominant energy source for years.

Kompania Weglowa, which runs 16 mines, is set to supply 2.5 million tonnes of coal per year. The group employees 65,000 people and currently digs an 46 million tonnes of coal in Poland annually.

It is not RWE's first venture in the Polish market.

Last week, it made a bid for a majority stake in Poland's number three energy group, Enea. It already owns the Polish energy supplier Stoen and has stakes in a power station and a water-supply firm.

In addition, RWE is building two wind-power plants at Tychowo and Suwalki in northern Poland at a cost of 100 million euros and plans to invest a further 400 million euros in Polish wind farms by 2015.

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