I am Greek and I'd like to express a different opinion. Let me first explain the situatin here: Greece has a very large amount of coal on its mountains; because

I am Greek and I'd like to express a different opinion. Let me first explain the situatin here: Greece has a very large amount of coal on its mountains; because of that, the Greek Public Power Corporation used to use its own thermoelectric power plants (i.e power factories that burn coal) to power almost all of Greece. The only parts of Greece that were not powered by these coal plants were most islands because they were not connected with the main network and used diesel engines to generate power. In any case, the thig is that this made Greece be self-sufficient on power and allowed us to pay a very small price on electrical bills (because coal is very cheap and we don't need to import it; actually the Greek Public Power Corporation owns the coal mines so it doesn't even pay for it, it only mines it). Unfortuanately, over the last 5-10 years this has changed greatly: The EU has passed some laws that force all members to have a minimum amount of "green" power (i.e wind / sun etc). This may seem like a good thing on first sight (Greece has a lot of sun and wind) but it is very, very problematic: The "green" power is much more expensive than traditional power (needs a lot of investments in new power plants which also are much more expensive than coal) and also it is much less reliable than good old coal (you also need power at night or when there's no wind, power cannot be saved to be used later). On top of that, the EU has also passed some CO2 laws that more or less forbid us to use our coal plants because if we keep using them we'll need to pay a very big fine for every ton of CO2 these plants produce. This resulted in a need for Greece to use imported natural gas to cover its power needs. The end result because of these two fine EU laws is that is we greeks pay the most expensive power in the EU, despite being one of the poorest countries! So, no matter what the article says or what laws have been passed, the truth is that: Greece cannot use its own coal nor its thermoelectric power plants because the EU will not allow Greece to use it. Greece is forced to import solar panels and wind turbines from abroad (while thermoelectric power plants that have been built a few years ago have been left to rot). Greece is also forced to use imported natural gas to cover its needs (while our mountains are full of coal).