PTOLEMAIDA: Mayor Panagiotis Plakentas fears what will happen to the town of Ptolemaida and the surrounding region when the last of the brown coal power plants in northern Greece close next year.
He told AFP that eight out of 10 young people who leave the region to study never come back and it risks “turning into Detroit,” the US city devastated by the collapse of the car industry.
Western Macedonia has for decades been the center of Greece’s brown coal mining industry that fed its lignite-fired power stations.
But now with power plant after power plant closing “unemployment is rising and the jobs that are being cut aren’t being replaced,” said Plakentas, further crippling a region with the country’s highest jobless rate.
Its last two brown coal plants will close next year, with the one in Ptolemaida being converted to run on natural gas, as Greece moves away from highly-polluting lignite in a sweeping transition toward renewable energy.
