<
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/uruguay-renewable-energy-revolution/>
"Much of the vast landscape of Uruguay remains true to its historical
image—down to the lone gaucho roaming the pampas. But there have been some
notable additions. Towering white wind turbines and glistening solar panels are
now as much a part of the iconography of Uruguay as the grass itself, though
they began to pop up across the country only in recent years, and seemingly all
at once. Not exactly tourist attractions, they are the most visible evidence of
a green energy transformation that continues to turn heads the world over:
Despite having far fewer resources than the United States, Germany, and other
wealthy nations that have been painfully slow to reduce their consumption of
fossil fuels amid the deepening climate crisis—as of 2023, only 21.4 percent of
the US power supply comes from renewables—Uruguay greened its grid in under a
decade.
Once reliant on exorbitantly priced fossil fuel imports for nearly half of its
energy needs, Uruguay has gone from suffering frequent blackouts and power cuts
to relative energy sovereignty based almost entirely on electricity generated
from a stable mix of wind, solar, hydroelectric, and bioenergy sources.
Although Uruguay’s radical experiment is now largely viewed as an international
success story, it was far from a given that the Uruguayans would succeed when
they set out in the early aughts to achieve what no other country in the world
had yet managed. And the stakes couldn’t have been higher: Not only could a
failure on this scale have sunk the newly elected left-leaning Frente Amplio
party while continuing to plague Uruguay with periods of destabilizing
blackouts; it could very well have set back the cause of green energy around
the globe, vindicating those who claimed that it was simply not possible for
this relatively new technology to meet an entire nation’s energy needs.
Uruguay’s green energy revolution, which began in earnest in 2008, has its
roots in the origins of the nation. Unlike Argentina and Brazil, its much
larger and more famous neighbors, Uruguay has never had any naturally occurring
fossil fuels. Founded in 1825 in the age of industrialization—a time when
countries would become increasingly dependent on coal, oil, and gas—Uruguay was
at an immediate energy disadvantage. It wasn’t until the advent of
hydroelectric power at the end of the 19th century that the country was able to
use its rivers to help meet its power needs. To this day, Uruguay continues to
rely heavily on its dams, including the imposing Salto Grande on the Río
Uruguay, whose power is shared with Argentina, and several on the Río Negro.
For decades, electricity from those dams and from generators running on gas and
oil imported largely from Argentina and Brazil met Uruguayans’ energy needs.
The whole system was run by the National Administration of Power Plants and
Electrical Transmissions, or UTE, the state-owned electric utility that held a
monopoly on the generation, transmission, and distribution of electricity since
its founding in 1912."
Via Susan ****
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
