This is a very important landmark for Greece: last week it ran on 100% renewable energy for the very first time in history!
This is really a great achievement, well ahead of what we were expecting, but yet, it’s not so easy to rejoice. In fact, we need to ask ourselves where is that renewable energy coming from.
The answer is that so many of the wind farms that produce that renewable energy have been built (and many will be built) even inside natural protected areas and National Parks. They have ruined beautiful remote landscapes, mountain tops and islands, and they are killing hundreds of birds, including endangered ones like raptors. Just because in Greece anything is possible.
Also, how is it possible that a country is running on 100% renewable energy but its cities have still some of the most polluted air of the EU? You would think that renewable energy equals clean air, since no fossil fuels are burnt in order to produce it. The fact is that there are still so many fossil fuels burnt in or cities and villages, right where 11 million people live and where there is so much need for clean air. It is there that we really need to reduce the consumption of fossil fuels to zero. But, in fact, nothing is done in order to reduce the millions of old, dirty cars, trucks, buses, motorcycles and heating systems (oil heaters, etc.) that choke our air while burning fossil fuels so inefficiently. And let’s not talk about the burning of wood (even if it is not a fossil fuel), which is not renewable and it brings to ruin entire forests to be burnt in order to warm us up in winter.
The 100% of clean, renewable energy is in fact produced far from the cities. It must not be so and, instead, we must be able to produce our own renewable energy right where we live, on our roofs and backyards. We must move around with clean, electric vehicles recharged from our very own solar panels. We must warm up our homes with electricity from the same solar panels, not with oil, gas, nor wood. We don’t need to rely for our clean energy needs on wind farms that – built on remote mountains and islands, have ruined important natural habitats and put animal/plant species in danger.
Only when we will have our own clean energy produced close to us we can be really happy that our country will be running on 100% of renewable energy, because we will know that no natural habitat will have been ruined in order to produce it and we will be breathing clean and fossil fuel/smoke-free air, at last.
CleanAir in Greece 