Some people might have the answers, but the average citizen – who doesn’t quite understand what games might be at play and judges based on common sense – can’t help but wonder:
It’s February, a winter month. These days, temperatures range from 20 to 9 degrees during the day, while at night, they hover just above zero inland and along the coast, and slightly below in the mountains.
You can hardly call these polar temperatures.
It’s simply winter, according to both the calendar and common sense. Hence the old saying that predated artificial intelligence: “February may bring spring’s scent near, but if angered, snow will appear.”
Yet here we are, talking about polar temperatures forcing us to turn on our heating, supposedly leaving us short of electricity.
How did we manage in previous winters, with even lower temperatures that weren’t dubbed ‘Coral’? Our fields are now covered with solar panels, our hills with wind turbines, plus the energy produced through conventional means as always.
What’s happened that we’ve gone from supplying electricity to the occupied territories to now needing them to supply us? They blame it on the cold snap. What cold snap? If we can’t cope energetically during the 5-10 days when temperatures drop below 20 degrees, what will we do in summer when temperatures of 40+ degrees last for weeks and months, with locals and tourists running their air conditioning 24/7?
Besides the cold snap, they say it’s also our bad luck because some production units have broken down, while others are undergoing scheduled maintenance.
“What timing they’ve chosen,” one might say. Maintenance in the middle of winter, as if we don’t know that while almond trees might bloom in February, it’s not yet spring.
On an island the size of Cyprus, with a million inhabitants and sunshine most of the year, all these issues should have been resolved long ago.
Cyprus could be energy self-sufficient without sacrificing forests and other areas for solar panels. And without paying pollution fines.
Here we are, rushing to do our laundry before sunset to avoid straining the system – that’s what they’ve advised us to do.
Meanwhile, we’re supposedly in the era of artificial intelligence, digital citizenship, green economy, and all those other pleasant-sounding terms. All of which apparently go hand in hand with lighting fires by rubbing two stones together, if need be.