The approaching end of a 60-year business association between power utility PPC and Aluminium of Greece, a member of the Mytilineos group, announced yesterday by the group’s chairman and CEO Evangelos Mytilineos, marks the end of an era with wider implications, as all the country’s energy and industrial groups are heading in the same direction.

“In 2023, Aluminium of Greece will no longer depend on PPC. It is moving into a new era as, for the first time since its establishment, the company will be freed from PPC in terms of electricity supply,” Mytilineos announced at a general shareholders’ meeting.

The future belongs to the vertically integrated groups, smaller versions of the power utility, set to enter and cover market needs.

Some enterprises have already prepared and positioned themselves for the new era, in which major-scale electricity consumers will no longer depend on PPC, instead covering needs through PPAs.

Companies that have been slower to incorporate Greece’s energy transition into their strategies must now move fast if they want to remain on the map.

The developments offer a glimpse of the energy sector’s new era. A more efficient PPC will no longer be weighed down by dependencies and compromises, private-sector groups will be structured for greener policies, RES investors will not depend on tariffs at RES auctions, but, instead, establish PPAs with industrial consumers, and competition will intensify through the many changes coming into play, such as the target model markets and the Capacity Remuneration Mechanism (CRM).

Green-energy investments, breaking one record after another, now appear likely to achieve a 2030 objective aiming for eco-friendly energy coverage of the country’s total energy demand at a level of 63 percent.

This essentially means that RES facilities offering a total capacity of 17 GW will be operating by the end of this decade, lessening the need for natural gas-fired power stations, which will become unsustainable, in market terms, as a large proportion of energy exchange transactions will be covered by increasingly competitive RES units.