Dear Governor,
Dear Mayor,
Dear Ministers,
Mr Chairman of the Board of Management of the Volkswagen Group, dear Herbert,
Mr. Ambassador,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Search hard enough and the future can be glimpsed in some surprising, some unexpected places.
Take this small, rocky island in the western part of the Dodecanese archipelago, more than 2,000 kilometers from VW’s high-tech plant and headquarters in Wolfsburg. It’s an island associated with an ancient civilization, with a rich culture, a rich past and a very, very promising future.
And yet what we are delivering here, on Astypalea, is nothing less than that new beginning.
It’s a doorway to a newer, cleaner, greener, more sustainable world, beyond the combustion engine. Where energy powers our lives without harming our planet.
What we are doing here represents one small but very important cog in our collective effort to solve the world’s climate emergency. And have no doubt, it is an emergency, an emergency of unprecedented scale. Our planet is warming rapidly. The consequences are felt everywhere.
Too many people are waiting for this emergency to be solved by others. Others are waiting for that “breakthrough moment,” that “eureka” moment, that magic silver bullet that is going to solve the climate crisis. I’m afraid that’s not how it’s going to happen.
Rather, if we are going to address this unprecedented crisis, then it will require bravery and we will have to address it all together, by acting together, in many different ways, across multiple areas, and we will have to do it simultaneously.
And in Greece we are doing our bit. We have brought forward the complete phasing out of lignite-powered electricity production, we are focusing our efforts on creating green jobs in areas of the country that were very dependent on heavy industry.
By 2030, two out of every three kilowatt hours consumed in Greece will come from renewable energy.
Through an unprecedented programme we are making Greece more energy efficient at home and at work. We are trapping heat in the winter, we are providing cool environments in the summer, without the need for energy-heavy air conditioning.
In April, we were one of the first European countries to submit our Recovery and Resilience Plan to the European Commission, what we call “Greece 2.0”: a raft of investments and reforms that will help us accelerate our transition from fossil fuels to a greener economy; and drive a cleaner natural environment through reforestation and the planting of 30 million new trees.
Taking care of the environment is of course nothing new for Greece. Neither is the partnership between the state and the private sector.
Behind me you can see examples of what renewable energy looked like hundreds of years ago: these traditional windmills that will be replaced by modern windmills and solar cells to provide clean energy. But I think it is an interesting bit of historical trivia that in 1889 the first “green” provision in the country’s legislation was passed. At the time it stated that “The chimneys of laboratories for the production of light and electricity should not emit dense smoke”. This resulted in the first filters being introduced to protect the environment.
The inspiration behind that pioneering law was reformist Prime Minister Charilaos Trikoupis, who wanted to combine private energy production with state provision for public health. It was a progressive idea with a strong social dimension. Building out Greece’s first networks of electricity, but not at the expense of clean air.
Today that progressive spirit is as alive and well as it was in 1889. Just as the Athens of 1889 welcomed the light of the future, so the Astypalea of 2021 illuminates tomorrow for the next generation.
And again it is the state collaborating with the private sector, dear Dr. Diess, that is driving the Mediterranean’s first “green” sustainable island.
Ladies and gentlemen,
As was previously described by Dr Fragogiannis, Dr Deiss, our plans for this beautiful island are bold. Astypalea will be the testbed for the green transition: energy generated entirely from nature, powering an all-electric, fully integrated transportation system. A circular energy system that will provide valuable insights and lessons that we hope, in time, will be scaled more widely across Greece and beyond.
To achieve this, we will be replacing the island’s diesel power stations with a system of photovoltaics and wind turbines, which will convert the sun and -as you can attest- the island’s abundant winds, into energy. Energy that will be stored in batteries for use by islanders in the homes they inhabit and, of course, in the electric cars we hope you will use.
The first electric cars on the island, the VW vehicles that you saw here today, will be used for public transport, by the Coast Guard, the Police and Civil Aviation. Hopefully we will soon also have an electric ambulance for the Health Center.
Charging points will be installed across the island. We already have 12, which I understand is the highest density of charging points in Greece, but many more will come. Half of them will be free to access. And in time we will offer 200 electric vehicles on the island for rent, meaning that visitors will also play an active part in driving sustainable tourism.
But of course our ambition, dear Mr Mayor, doesn’t end here. We have already launched, as you saw, the e-astypalea platform to help islanders replace every one of their 1,500 conventional, internal combustion vehicles with electric ones. And of course, as you saw, the subsidies are much more generous than the rest of the subsidies we have for the Greek mainland. There will be subsidies not just for private vehicles, but also for taxis, cars, motorcycles, electric bikes, and of course for the charging points that will drive this electric revolution.
I am also fascinated by the fact that this process will be monitored, observed and researched by two leading universities, the University of the Aegean and the University of Strathclyde, which will work alongside VW, monitoring and systematically evaluating this transformation of Astypalea.
Their study will focus on what the island’s inhabitants think of the new mobility and energy system and what factors actually influence their transition to green energy. The results of this study will be publicly available and in time we hope will help other countries as they look to create their own sustainable energy solutions.
As Prime Minister it is the potential that we see here, on Astypalea, that excites me the most. The potential to obviously take these lessons to other islands. The potential to use these insights to create the right system of incentives for change.
And the potential, of course, to scale a pilot on an island of just 1,300 permanent inhabitants to other parts of Greece and to other countries around the world.
We need to drive change at a very fast pace, we need to do it more than ever. Our experience over the last 18 months has shown us that our world is very fragile. It has demonstrated to us that if we do not take care of nature, if we do not respect our natural environment and habitats, our world will be placed under threat.
But we have also demonstrated what is possible when we work together. Our scientists have compressed the work of a decade into less than a year; we have discovered a number of new vaccines in record time, we have applied innovative technologies such as messenger-RNA.
I find it stunning that little more than a year from the start of the pandemic more than 5.5 million doses of vaccines have already been administered in Greece. Two million Greeks are now fully vaccinated.
And, of course, Mr Mayor, I would like to congratulate you because the uptake of vaccines on the island of Astypalea has been very, very high: almost 80% of the population of the island has already been vaccinated because we have prioritized our small islands in the vaccine program. And you are sending a very, very positive signal to the rest of the country about the merits of vaccination.
I am also proud that technology and ideas that have been pioneered and promoted here in Greece have been adopted to tackle the crisis. We were pioneers when it came to AI-driven smart testing; the use of the passenger locator form; and of course the European vaccine certificate, what we now call the “digital covid pass,” has become a reality. And we are very proud that we were able to prove that when Europe wants to work together, it can deliver results for its citizens in record time.
I think that spirit of cooperation, that speed of action, that sense of urgency, must be the model for tackling the climate emergency. We now know that we can achieve great results when we work together rather than against each other, when the private sector, academia, governments, local communities come together.
Here, in Astypalea, we are doing just that.
I want to finish with some important “thankyous”. To the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Deputy Minister Fragogiannis, who first came up with this idea. And when we started talking about this project I know that Dr Diess was skeptical but I can sense the excitement in the VW team now that the project is actually taking off. This is a tremendous opportunity for Greece, for Astypalea, for the country. And we will be following the progress of the project very keenly and we will stand by the island, the local community, help Volkswagen make sure that this project is a success. So, I want to thank your team for investing a lot of effort into this project.
Also, particular thanks to the Ministry of the Environment, the Minister, the Secretary General, Alexandra Sdoukou, for leading our e-mobility effort.
Thank you to the Regional Governor. Thank you so much dear Mayor for your support.
I would like to thank all residents of Astypalaia, who embraced this innovative idea from the first moment. We will not be able to help the green transition come to pass unless citizens first realize that it is to their benefit. We want you to be our allies in this, because it will be to your benefit at the end of the day: it will mean a better environment, extraordinary advertising for your island throughout the world, lower bills as far as mobility is concerned.
But also this very important sentiment and pride that you must feel as residents of this beautiful island; this feeling that you are part of something really innovative, something pioneering, that we hope will serve as a model for all our islands. And we hope -as was mentioned during the presentation- that it will bring the future to Astypalea, even sooner than it would have happened under different conditions.
As was already mentioned, when you see images of Astypalea from above, from space, or if you look at it on the map, you see an island remarkably shaped like a butterfly. I can’t think of a better symbol of the natural but also of the mechanical than the butterfly.
We know that our world is delicate in balance. If a small “butterfly island” can play its part in tilting that balance in favour of the natural world, then this five-year experiment will have been worth the effort.
Thank you for listening and thank you for being here today. Best of luck with the project.
