One large plant requires so much coal it has its own dedicated strip mine. They move 5 million cubic feet of rock and soil a day to get at the 1 million cubic feet of coal needed daily.
To save on transportation costs and CO2 from transportation they built the coal power plant within sight of the coal mine.
They use some of the largest strip mining equipment in the world to get the coal. The coal being strip mined is lignite or brown coal. A dirty burning soft coal that requires expensive precombustion technologies to increase efficiency and reduce emissions. Technologies the German government will not confirm have been used.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overburden_Conveyor_Bridge_F60http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-19/merkel-s-green-shift-forces-germany-to-burn-more-coal-energy.html 
