The 285 doses and an unexpected hurdle
The brand-new, well-equipped Dimitris Kremastinos Polyvalent Regional Clinic, named after the cardiologist and politician born on the island who died of the coronavirus last May, is on a hillside 500 meters from the port. Municipal employees Vassilis Kourtis and Stavros Argyriou take the elderly up there on a golf cart donated recently by a Greek American from Halki. We also rode up the hill on the golf cart. Those scheduled to be vaccinated on the first day were already there. Residents were coming in to ask about their place in the queue and there was the excitement of the unknown hanging in the air.
The clinic’s permanent staff, country doctor Athina Arvanitidou and nurse Maria Anastassi, were there, along with municipal employee Fotini Argyriou and nurse Katholiki Perraki, who had the names of all those due to receive the jab on a piece of paper. From time to time they hollered to make sure social distancing was being observed and the people didn’t bunch together. “I haven’t heard my name called out like this since school and the army. I feel 20 again!” a very sweet elderly man said. The military doctors and nurses had taken up their posts in an adjacent room. Along with the 258 vaccine doses, they had been supplied with a tablet to connect with the database of IDIKA, the e-Government Center for Social Security that gives the go-ahead for vaccinations based on people’s AMKA social security numbers. At one point an unexpected issue cropped up: The online system refused to authorize some AMKAs, especially those of people under 60. Probably because the system had not been updated – not the Ministry of Digital Governance’s fault, I subsequently discovered – to accept people outside the age groups given priority for vaccination. In the case of Halki, the whole island was given priority. Messages were exchanged, civil servants were mobilized and the order was given to proceed with the vaccination by taking down the names on paper, where necessary. The Greek penchant to think on one’s feet rather than rigidly follow the rules saved the situation, not to mention the doses, which can quickly become unusable. The military doctor, First Lieutenant Maria Varsami, along with the nurse, Sergeant Alexandra Tentsoglidou, and assistant nurse Nikos Stoyiannos, who works on the island, breathed a collective sigh of relief and began the vaccinations. The race was on.
The Environment and Energy Ministry is trying to solve the conundrum of securing low electricity costs for energy-intensive industries without burdening Public Power Corporation.
Minister Kostas Skrekas’ objective is to make the most of the informal extension of negotiations between PPC and industries up until June, so as to use new instruments and measures that require the approval either of the European Commission or the national regulators in the battle to lower the energy costs.
In this context the ministry has served as an early notice to the Directorate General for Competition (DGComp) the proposal for a subsidy of 15 euros per megawatt-hour on the price of energy supplied to industry through bilateral contracts from producers of renewable energy.
At the same time, in cooperation with the Regulatory Authority for Energy, the Independent Power Transmission Operator (ADMIE) and the Hellenic Electricity Distribution Network Operator (HEDNO), the ministry is working on a plan to reduce the regulatory charges for industrial medium- and high-voltage consumers.
“We will exhaust all possibilities of reducing regulatory charges and every measure that may lead to a reduction in the cost of energy for Greek industry, like other countries do, in the context of the European framework,” Skrekas tells Kathimerini, acknowledging the need to support industry and at the same time PPC’s right to form its own commercial policy, taking into account the context of the market in which it operates.
The plan that the ministry notified Brussels about in early February, regarding green power purchase agreements, relies on the promotion of environmentally friendly energy along with the bolstering of industries that will use the bilateral contracts through a €15/MWh discount, an amount proposed to be covered by the EU recovery fund.
The Greek plan differs in many ways from a similar plan by Spain for the part-compensation of energy-intensive industries in the procurement of RES energy that the European Commission recently approved. Sources say that one of the questions Brussels has asked Athens is why Greece is not following the Spanish model.