The Greek government intends to put forward a draft law on reducing bureaucracy and simplifying licensing and exploitation procedures for renewable sources of energy.
The draft makes provision for incentives and measures to promote the development of "green energy", which the Prime Minister described as a "one-way street" for combating the crisis. For her part the Environment minister pointed out that "The aim of the draft law is to increase generation of power from renewable sources of energy to 20% of total power production by 2020 and 40% of power production from electrical energy." Greece currently produces only 6.7% of its power from renewable sources of energy, such as solar cells.
The new draft law aims to fundamentally reorganise the regulatory framework for licensing renewable energy projects, create the necessary structures for project implementation in areas with increased renewable energy potential, modify the existing legal framework for special utilization, introduce a comprehensive bundle of incentives, stipulate prices within the renewable energy field, and motivate creation of renewable energy-gross-CHP.
Another important point is reduction of the time the licensing procedure takes from the current 3 to 5 years to 8 to 10 months. The process for grant of a power generation licence will furthermore be separated from environmental licensing. As a result the preliminary process for auditing the environmental conditions and the process for granting permits under nature protection law will be standardised.
The aim is also to set up an independent office for which the Environment minister will be directly responsible and which is intended to serve as an information and service coordinating body for investors for "green energy" projects.
Even if Greece were the European leader in the field of wind power, the market for investment in this field is hardly saturated, so investors will still find plenty of scope for activities and investment in this sector. For comparison, the following total wind power capacities have been installed to date (2008 figures):
Greece 985 MW
Spain 16,756 MW
Germany 23,903 MW.

For more information please see:
Why to Invest in Photovoltaics in Greece
Photovoltaics and Renewable Energy Sources in Greece