"Ask me what was the impact on the electricity sector in Uruguay after this tragic war in Europe — zero."
"with wind the single-biggest contributor.... Power production costs have declined “by almost half” .... And the clean energy sector has created 50,000 new jobs.... Ask me what was the impact on the electricity sector in Uruguay after this tragic war in Europe — zero."
I actually never thought of it like that, if you're not partaking in the trade of fossil fuels, you are removing yourself from a lot of potential conflicts and "who support who" ordeals.
Sadly, in the meantime it also mean a surge of imports of fossil fuels from other countries and reopening extraction sites in EU. Reducing fossil fuel dependency really is the top priority of EU, not only for ecology but also for peace and for the economy.
We'll control the wind and rain. It was a saying in soviet block during cold war and elites really thought they would. By spraying chemicals in clouds etc. Disgusting.
Except once you have the turbines and panels, you don't have to keep importing resources to run them. Sure, you might need parts for maintenance, but if things go south it's a lot easier to reverse engineer parts than to find new oil suppliers.
They also have hydropower which provides a constant base load, and basically they have just heavily optimised their distribution of power to be very efficient. In emergencies they are also able to import power from neighbouring countries.
Looks like that's just the grid? I'm sure there's more to go for transportation and eliminating the need for generators and gas, but this is a great start!
I remembered reading many years ago about large solar plants in SA and I wondered what happened to that. Apparently Zuma happened: From a world leader in renewables, to years behind, thanks to Zuma and his cronies.
I don't know how much I trust that website. It states that British Columbia has 100% of its power generation from an unknown source, which it labels as "500 grams per kwhr" equivalent to coal. But we know that 100% of British Columbia's electricity comes from hydro...
This aspect is a big aspect of intermittent renewables energy that is often dismissed: you need piloted energy as a backup, the amount of piloted energy depend on how oversized is the intermittent energy installation.
For renewable piloted energy there is two options that I know of: hydro and biomass. Uruguay is using both.
It's something to keep in mind if we want to reach 100% renewables without nuclear, we need to increase the biomass electricity production.
On another hand we are already using a lot of biomass to produce ethanol and biodiesel. A lot of land is also use for animal feed, so I'm a society with less ICE cars and less meat eated we might have enough land to grow biomass for electricity generation.
Well then it's a good thing that's United States produces 20 to 25% of its electricity through nuclear power generation. It would be a good idea to maintain that.
You can check it out in real time here:
UTE Generation
Biomass is not something so actively sought, it's more of a consequence of other industries here.
You are correct that we have other renewable sources that work when wind is not on its peak. There are two hidro plants that can work when demand is large and wind is not on its peak, and they've managed to keep this regime even on dry or draught conditions.
We really need to think of biomass as batteries. In both cases, it’s tough to scale up enough for full coverage but we know how to store biodiesel or ethanol, it’s very energy dense. Scattering a bunch of diesel generators with big biodiesel tanks might be a better answer than batteries for when the wind doesn’t blow
It also ensures a market and distribution industry for farming and construction vehicles where batteries may not work
It takes a decade and quite a bit of space to make a tree (for example), it's technically renewable but the fuel production is very slow. I'm curious how they're planning to keep that up
Indeed, I have some friends who live in South America and they tell me that electric scooters and three wheelers are becoming very popular. Imported from China.
Actually, with clean sources of electricity like wind and solar, the amount consumption doesn't matter.
It only matters if there isn't enough for everyone, or the power comes from non-green sources (coal etc)
I don't understand the objection to greater efficiency... Even renewables are not without their own environmental costs of mining, transportation, manufucaturing etc. If we use less power we can more easily transition to renewables, with less disruption to the environment.
"Hydropower provides a large percentage of installed production capacity in Uruguay, almost all of it produced by four hydroelectric facilities, three on the Rio Negro and one, the Salto Grande dam shared with Argentina, on the Uruguay River. The production from these hydropower sources is dependent on seasonal rainfall patterns, but under normal hydrological conditions, can supply off-peak domestic demand."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Uruguay