‘Energy independent’ Uruguay runs on 100% renewables for four straight months
"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.
Yes, I think that one of the side effect of the war in Ukraine will be a big increase of renewables energy in Europe.
European countries started to realize how fragile their energy supply is and how dangerous it is.
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.
...Except China, where most renewables are produced.
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.
Only because they produce them the cheapest and in the largest quantities (which goes hand in hand).
Basically any country can produce solar panels and wind turbines. Both technology and resource wise.
We've been at ~95% renewable for years actually, but now we've reached 100%
How do you cope when there is cloudy without wind?
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.
How often is there no wind anywhere?
How cloudy does it have to be so you can't generate power?
Is it possible to store power?
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!
does anyone ever assume that it's anything other than the grid when it comes to some article like this?
Too bad it's far too late.
Meanwhile in South Africa, we're having blackouts while being almost completely dependant on coal.
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.
But I bet the companies make a lot of profit on that, so all good \s
Yep they kick back to the politicians so perfectly to plan
You know you need a lot of sun and wind for renewable energy?
Pretty sure South Africa has too little of it unlike those sunny and wind torn countries like, don't know... Germany?
Plus coal is more expensive power.
Well done Uruguay.
Amazing
53,000 barrels/day
It looks like Uruguays oil consumption has flatlined since about 2014. I can't find any newer data than 2016 but here's my source:
i think evs are still too expensive for the common uruguaian(?) wallet. so they still use oil for cars. but 4 months 100% renewables is great news.
Presumably mostly for transportation sector. EV adoption should lower that.
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.
I wonder how much of that is biomass, and how they're planning to grow enough vegetation to renew iy
https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/UY
You can select 30d, year... And see how much was used for that period.
What is that unknown bar meant to be?
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.
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
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.
I'll have to check later. It seems like the page is down, I'll get back to you. thank you!
how those middle east prince now can buy more hookers and supercars if u guys not using oil
Very cool. I hope they are looking at reducing demand for power as much as increasing production.
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)
Nuclear fanbois: GASP! How dare you?!
Well, not every country has wind farms or water turbines as viable option. You know, geography and stuff...
I am not intending to add fuel to this fire of a comment thread, however I was wondering if Stockholm, Sweden's solution of burning culled rabbits, for fuel, would be considered 'reneweable energy'?
I don't understand the nuclear energy hate. Of the nonrenewables it is the cleanest, and it is not always possible to run 100% renewable, (they depend on natural factors such as sun or wind), while nuclear is constant and always producing. Look at Germany and how it is polluting using gas and fossiles, it would be a million times better it they used nuclear energy.
Nuclear is just not practical. Even if you discount the risk of severe impact if anything ever goes wrong, and the long term impact on the environment if the fuel and waste chain. we’ve countless case studies that it’s just too expensive, too complex to build, too much putting all your eggs in one basket.
Making up some numbers but I think the scale is right …. Which would you choose:
— $12B and 10-20 years to build a nuclear plant, requiring highly specialized fuel and employees.all or nothing: you get no benefit the whole time it’s under construction so payback is multiple decades. Given the specialty fuel, employees, security, it’s the most expensive choice to operate
— $1B and 10-12 years to build a wind farm, but you start getting income as soon as sections come online. Fuel cost is zero and one being out for maintenance has negligible impact in production/profit. You get payback practically as soon as the project is built and it’s all gravy from there
Because it's an obvious psyop that took over almost every social media platform. No one was talking about nuclear then BOOM everyone was talking about nuclear all of a sudden with exactly zero mainstream public input from politicians or even marketing from nuclear power companies. People hate nuclear, because some of us have been alive long enough to remember Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima (the worst nuclear disaster in human history, 2011).
Here's a list of every single nuclear meltdown/disaster/catastrophe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_and_incidents
The fission reaction to boil the water to spin the turbines is clean, but literally every single other facet of nuclear production, from mining, to enriching, to transport, to post-reaction storage (where nuclear waste inevitably always leaks) is disastrous for the environment.
It's a good energy source in principle and Germany definitely should have let their reactors run longer, but it's just too damn expensive to build new ones. I'm not aware of any serious private installations of nuclear that are being built right now. One small modular reactor company in the US recently announced they will need twice as much money as previous estimated to build one.
Meanwhile, a ton of people and companies are building solar and wind everywhere.
I'd be willing to bet most people you'd categorize as "nuclear fanbois" would be perfectly happy if hydroelectric was providing 65% of the grid power.
The problem is that that renewables are pushed as a "one size fits all" solution that they really aren't.
Was the wind blowing all night every night? Or do they have enough hydro (or another power source) to power then while the sun is down?
Ever heard of batteries?
Ever heard of insane amount of batteries required for that?
No, what are they?
"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
