Mayor Panagiotis Plakentas fears what will happen to the town of Ptolemaida, a key industrial city in Western Macedonia, and the surrounding region when the last of the brown coal power plants in northern Greece close next year.

He told reporters that eight out of 10 young people who leave the region to study never come back and it risks "turning into Detroit," the US city devastated by the collapse of the car industry.

For decades, Western Macedonia has been the center of Greece's brown coal mining industry that fed its lignite-fired power stations.

But now with power plant after power plant closing "unemployment is rising and the jobs that are being cut aren't being replaced," said Plakentas, further crippling a region with the country's highest jobless rate.

A  sweeping transition

Its last two brown coal plants will close next year, with the one in Ptolemaida being converted to run on natural gas, as Greece moves away from highly-polluting lignite in a sweeping transition towards renewable energy.

Three men who will soon lose their jobs sipped their coffee as they looked at the chimneys of the doomed electricity station at nearby Agios Dimitrios, which will close in May. 

"The lignite monoculture has been both a blessing and a curse for the region," one said emphatically. "On the one hand, it has provided work for most people for decades, but the local economy's dependence on it has been so great that it makes us feel there's no tomorrow."

Public Power Company (PPC) has promised more than €5 billion of investment in solar panel parks, data centers and energy storage units in the region over the next three years.

But the head of the local council, Ilias Tentsoglidis, said he sees no sign of these projects as he condemned what he called "brutal de-lignite-isation."

'Our villages are emptying'

Many locals want the land back that was expropriated by PPC years ago to mine the low-grade brown coal so they can farm it again. 

"Our villages are emptying and, in the region's most fertile plain, we're sowing glass and concrete," said Tentsoglidis in a tilt at the solar farms. 

Western Macedonia's unemployment rate is double the 8.1 percent national average, according to the ELSTAT statistics office. It has also recorded the sharpest demographic decline over the last decade, losing a tenth of its population. 

More than 10,000 jobs have already been lost, unions estimate, and that is expected to double once the green transition plan is fully implemented in 2028. 

'Drinking poison'

But decades of lignite extraction has also affected the health of people in the region. Improved air quality resulting from the industry's decline has been linked to a drop in heart disease in the area, according to a study published this month in the journal Atmosphere. 

A court recently ordered PPC to pay around €1.5 million in damages for contaminating the groundwater due to poor management of ash around the nearby city of Kozani. 

"We were drinking poison" without knowing it, said Tentsoglidis bitterly. "We woke up one morning and were told the water was no longer drinkable. Not only should we not drink it, we shouldn't touch it either," he said.

Alexis Kokkinidis, a 45-year-old mechanic who works at the Agios Dimitrios plant, feels "uncertainty and fear" about the future.

 "The only thing keeping me here is emotional attachment," admitted the father of two, whose contract ends in May. "I was born and raised here, but you can't live on feelings."