Greece Keen To End Lignite Use And Become A Regional Renewables Power Hub

Lignite, also known as brown coal, tops the list of undesirable fossil fuels. It is full of impurities and partially decayed plant matter. It has low heat content, high moisture and, consequently, its emissions are particularly damaging.

But it has been an essential fuel in parts of the world where bituminous coal isn’t available, including Germany and Greece.

In Greece, it has been the staple fuel for electricity generation since the 1920s. Lignite, like peat, is often surface mined and it is his memories of those mines — their utter environmental devastation — that drives Konstantinos Mavros, CEO of PPC Renewables, a wholly owned subsidiary of Public Power Corporation, the leading electricity producer in Greece.

When I met with Mavros in his office in Athens recently, he told me that the scene at those abandoned mines is one of an ugly moonscape.

PPC Renewables is growing fast as the leading renewables platform in southeastern Europe. It has huge ambitions not just in Greece, but also as a regional provider of clean electricity. The company has just bought a local utility in Romania, formerly owned by Italy’s Enel.

Greece has many advantages as a renewable energy powerhouse, but it has one massive impediment.

The advantages are that the wind blows off the Aegean Sea and the sun famously shines; there is wind power in the mountains, along with pump storage in hybrid stations; and there is geothermal and biogas potential.

The big impediment is that Greece is the birthplace of civilization, and you can’t build a wind farm on, say, the site of the Temple of Poseidon on Cape Sounion or cover residential roofs on the treasured Greek islands with solar panels. Additionally, you can’t easily site offshore wind in the Aegean off the islands.

Siting is a unique challenge in Greece simply because it is Greece. But Mavros — who has evangelical zeal for what his company is doing — is exploiting what has been despoiled. Those abandoned and unsightly lignite strip mines are being covered with solar panels, in what Mavros sees as something of a redeeming repurposing. “What I’m doing is legacy work,” he said.

The concept of legacy figures prominently in Mavros’ conversation and his sense of commitment. It started with his father, who once worked for oceanographer Jacques Cousteau. He was elated when he found some Cousteau maps, signed by his father.

Mavros feels the work he is doing is a continuation of his father’s legacy. In helping to turn Greece green, he is leaving a legacy to the country’s future. It is a theme he returns to in his conversation over and again.

It is the creation of this environmental legacy for Greece, and eventually across Europe, that drives him. “I’m here first thing in the morning because this is what I feel I must do,” he told me.

He throws out that he has installed this sense of purpose in his children: saving the legacy, saving the environment, and saving historic Greece.

Even without the dedication which Mavros attributes to the need to contain global warming and to leave a legacy, he would appear to have driven hard from his college days and before. He got a bachelor’s from the University of Kent in Southeast England, and a master’s in finance from Imperial College London. Then he studied global energy policy at the Harvard Business School and returned five years later to study strategic financial planning.

Before settling into managing an electricity company, Mavros was an investment professional, who also had an executive role in a telecoms venture and renewable energy companies before taking over the critical PCC Renewables portfolio and engineering a growth spurt. He told me finance and telecoms both played a constructive part in preparing him for the C-suite of PCC Group, where he arrived in 2019.

The renewables company started in the 1980s and has amassed a substantial portfolio of projects. Currently it owns 34 small wind farms, 19 small hydro plants, 31 solar installations – and it has ambitious growth plans as Greece transitions from fossil fuels, Mavros told me. As of now, PPC Renewables has a combined output of just 600 MW and is set for exponential growth.

Impressive as renewable energy gains have been in Greece, more still needs to be done, according to a 2023 survey by the International Energy Agency (IEA), which saluted Athens for reducing the amount of lignite in the fuel mix to 10 percent this year from 60 percent in 2005. The Paris-based agency noted that Greece has increased its renewables dramatically and has established interconnections with regional neighbors in order to be able to export surplus renewable power.

Wind, the IEA noted, is the largest renewable now deployed in Greece. In all, the country’s electricity supply is still dominated by fossil fuels, notably gas. But since the Ukraine war, it has reduced gas imports from Russia and switched to liquefied natural gas.

Greece is committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 55 percent by 2030 and to reach net zero by 2050. It plans to end lignite use by 2028.

Ironically, Greece leads the world in so-called thermal rooftop solar but those installations, which are visible on almost every roof, only produce hot water.

There is room on the roofs for the Mavros team, as they power forward toward that 2030 goal and beyond.