300 billion Euros? How much is that in kilowatt hours?

The Greek economic tragedy is scarcely out of the news these days, but the future might just be a little sunnier, thanks to solar PV.

Project Helios (Greek for ‘sun’) is Greece’s plan to take advantage of one of its greatest natural resources – its high levels of sunshine – and turn it to its economic advantage.

Oddly enough, although Greece gets about 50% more solar radiation than Germany (the world leader when it comes to solar PV), the Greek capacity for solar PV is dwarfed by the Germans’.

Project Helios aims to change all that, with an almost tenfold increase in capacity from 206MW to 2.2GW by 2020.

Indeed, Greece may eventually find itself exporting solar-generated power to Germany.

So while the short-term future is bleak, perhaps the current economic crisis will be just the catalyst needed to turn Greece into Europe’s clean energy power house.