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'Energy independent' Uruguay runs on 100% renewables for four straight months
- vfclists 3y agoHow much heavy industry is there in Uruguay?
- artyom 3y agoClose to none. Most of the heavy industry products (e.g. cars) are imported from either Brazil or Argentina. There's a lot of agriculture tho.
- filmor 3y agoYet, the per capita energy usage is much higher in Uruguay, according to these: https://www.worlddata.info/america/uruguay/energy-consumption.php https://www.worlddata.info/america/uruguay/energy-consumptio... (3.4 MWh) https://www.worlddata.info/america/brazil/energy-consumption.php https://www.worlddata.info/america/brazil/energy-consumption... (2.5 MWh) https://www.worlddata.info/america/argentina/energy-consumption.php https://www.worlddata.info/america/argentina/energy-consumpt... (2.6 MWh)
- artyom 3y agoA couple heavy industries (e.g. literally two paper plants) coupled with a largely unpopulated country (one major city and a handful few towns) makes the "per Capita" metric high. Not bashing them tough. They're wonderful people and I love going on vacation there, but saying that very heavy industry reliant countries e.g. Germany can just imitate the model is misleading
- phtrivier 3y agoWhich makes the title "Energy independent" and "100% renewables" all the more infuriating. (To the point where i'm wondering if it's not bait for people who have a clue about the topic.) If you have lots of mountains and lots of space to put solar panels / windmills, you can get a lot of your electricity from renewables sources, which is great for a lot of applications. (If you can have nuclear power, it's not "renewable" per se, but it's very low on carbon, which is useful in itself, whith the usual caveats.) But the "small" issue is that tractors in the fields and trucks moving fertilizers and chemicals and produces around are, at the moment, mostly relying on oil. So, at the moment, being "100% energy independent with renewables" means you have to make the small compromise of "not eat food." Where is the "Tesla of tractors" ? Which EV company is seriously addressing "freight" ?
- mcv 3y agoEvery country has "lots of space to put solar panels". Except maybe city states that are all skyscrapers. But for now there's no shortage of space where you could put solar panels without them being in anyone's way. Put them on every roof, over every parking lot (where they help keep cars cool in summer), over ever bike path (where they help keep cyclists dry in the rain).
- hef19898 3y agoThat what interconnected grids are there for... No need to stop an electricity grid at a border.
- phtrivier 3y agoCountries want (rather understandably) to produce some of the electricity they consume. I don't know how connected the Urugayan grid is to neighboors. If anything, this makes the "Energy independent" part even more dubious :D (really, apart from China - or maybe USA, I don't know which country could be "independent", given that you need both fossil deposits and the right metal mines to build an energy system...) We're almost all in the same boat, and we all have to do our best. Inter-dependence without over-concentration is a feature, not a bug :D
- Retric 3y agoIf you want to consider the energy balance of food production then every country runs 99% on renewable energy as plants collect solar power at a scale that absolutely dwarfs everything else. Even a very low estimate of 1,549,600 km2 of crops * 1% efficiency from photosynthesis * 15% capacity factor is ~2,000,000 TWh / year vs 27,000 TW from electricity. Add in forests providing lumber, grass feeding cattle, and plankton feeding fish etc and the numbers get much larger. As such total energy balance isn’t a particularly useful metric. Instead we use subsets of total energy such as the electric grid and 100% renewable is perfectly valid in that context.
- phtrivier 3y ago
- repelsteeltje 3y agoI think there is considerable paper industry (which is notoriously energy hungry). Also growing software industry, so data centers might weigh in? Cement maybe?
- artyom 3y agoThere's a couple paper plants, not sure if you'll call that "considerable". Software there is growing but mostly as consulting. Also b/c of the tax breaks companies are incorporated there, but people works elsewhere. On the cloud side if someone needs edge stuff they use Buenos Aires or Sao Paulo in AWS. There's no region in Uruguay
- Someone 3y agoAs usual with this kind of reporting, it’s not really running 100% on renewables. “In the three months to end-September 2023, the South American nation generated all of its electricity from renewable sources”. ⇒ Good result, but not there yet.
- CalRobert 3y agoIs that not implied?
- phh 3y agoIt is indeed implied, BUT making it not explicit is IMO a big problem. Many people are reading these articles' title as "we're almost there with carbon neutral". Even the quotation is playing on this ambiguity "“You become independent of all these kinds of wars or other geopolitical events,” Méndez Galain said." I personally felt for it for quite some time: as a French we say our electricity is nuclear, so we're much much better than our eco-friendly neighbour Germany wrt carbon. But that's completely missing the point. (I'm not saying we're actually worse than them, but we all have still much to improve) I fall in the area of people who think journalists' job is not just to report fact, but to properly phrase them to understand the implications, you might disagree with that.
- cies 3y ago> Renewables alone have powered the Uruguayan economy for nearly four straight months. Not even the title is misleading, the first sentence of the article as well. "the Uruguayan economy" includes mobility (cars, planes), industry, heating of homes. If this is the way we want to promote renewables, by straight up lying, we are merely deceiving ourselves.
- lynx23 3y agoFact is, everyone is subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) lying. The right is lying to the left, and the left is lying to the right. If I learnt anything from COVID-19, nobody can be trusted, no matter where they stand.
- mschuster91 3y ago> Because the state couldn’t fund a massive energy programme alone, it ran a series of clean power auctions, where it offered project developers 20-year contracts to sell electricity into the national grid at guaranteed rates. This is a carbon copy of what Germany did prior to the infamous "Altmaier-Knick" and "Gabriel-Tief [1], both named after the utterly incompetent ministers responsible for cutting back on these programs. Prior to that, our solar industry was world leading in competence and production capacity, it all shifted to China afterwards. [1] https://www.fraunhofer.de/de/forschung/aktuelles-aus-der-forschung/energie.html https://www.fraunhofer.de/de/forschung/aktuelles-aus-der-for...
- CalRobert 3y agoYour car industry will be headed there next it seems.
- mschuster91 3y agoThat's not due to incompetent politicians for once. The crisis of the German car industry is entirely of its own doing - they completely ignored electric power for years, and instead focused on lobbying to get rid of emission limits, which obviously left them stranded in a ditch after Dieselgate. On top of that, everyone but Volkswagen was/is focused on high-margin SUVs and luxury vehicles, which aren't really a thing outside of corporate "luxury" for upper level management and new-rich in China, and Volkswagen completely dropped the ball in software quality.
- spaniard89277 3y agoIt's a disgrace that we're not able to buy cheap and light cars in the EU anymore. I just want a ~2010 Fiat Panda :(
- V__ 3y agoRenaults Zoe also seems great, I see quite a lot of them on German streets.
- Andrew018 3y ago[dead]
- imadierich 3y ago[dead]
- wholien 3y agofor another POV on Uruguay, here's Doomberg's recent article on Uruguay: https://doomberg.substack.com/p/false-utopia https://doomberg.substack.com/p/false-utopia
- rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 3y agopaywalled
- kranke155 3y agoI used to read him but soon find it tiring. His perspective is always "im right and everyone else is wrong".
- RALaBarge 3y agoSounds like he is one of us then!
- gruppe_sechs 3y agoAs opposed to other writers whose perspective is "I'm wrong"?
- pydry 3y agoThe article asks for money at exactly the point where it was going to tell you what the problems were. I have some suspicions.
- jurgenaut23 3y agoI don’t even need to read the article to know that this is BS. They ran on renewables for their electricity, which is likely less than 50% of their _energy_ consumption. As long as journalists don’t know the difference, we won’t be in a good place. The real challenge isn’t quite to produce clean electricity (nuclear plants have excellent co2 footprints per kWh over their lifecycle if you don’t mind the very cumbersome and lethal waste they produce). The challenge is to reduce our global footprint, _including_ non-energy components such as biodiversity, soil and ocean preservation, forest and wilderness conservation, and all other planetary limits.
- boxed 3y agoI mean.. getting politicians to start taking the tech seriously and investing in solar/hydro/wind/nuclear is a HUGE challenge. It looks pretty grim in fact.
- dhoe 3y agoI don't have numbers, but huge parts of Montevideo must be relying on wood burning for heating. The effect is very noticeable in the air quality in winter (I've lived there for three years recently).
- woodisgood 3y agoIs wood not a renewable resource? Closed loop of carbon.
- pxeger1 3y agoThat’s no good if replanting is slower than consumption.
- olddustytrail 3y agoNo, it isn't, but people who run a forestry business obviously plant enough trees to make sure they have enough timber to keep going.
- Angostura 3y agoIt is - but particulates are a massive health issue.
- JR1427 3y agoI totally agree. In the UK, many (often well off) people in towns and cities want to have an open fire or wood stove for fun. It makes no sense for this to be legal in densely-populated areas, that can afford cleaner alternatives.
- JR1427 3y agoWood smoke can also trigger asthma, so roughly 10pct of the population face a potential life-threatening situation from it. https://www.cdc.gov/asthma/triggers.html https://www.cdc.gov/asthma/triggers.html And if the problem is because of your neighbour, there is not a lot you can do about it.
- ptero 3y agoThis is a bit misleading. While the achievement is impressive, it talks about electric utility generation. Uruguay, with heavily agrarian economy, uses a lot of field machinery, which is not covered by this.
- hef19898 3y agoLove it how people are rediscovering primary and secondary energy, and the difference between those two...
- aaron695 3y ago[dead]
- lm28469 3y agoAlternative title: Small country with lot of sun, low population, no industry and a kwh/capita 4 times lower than the US can run on renewable during summer.
- regularjack 3y agoStill quite an achievment in my book.
- jurgenaut23 3y agoWell, it shows also how crazy difficult that is.
- AndrewKemendo 3y agoSo far in this thread nobody wants to believe the headline/article, and these are the leading reasons: 1. Citizens must be relying on wood instead and that's bad for the air 2. This doesn't cover ALL possible energy use, including petroleum powered vehicles (despite the fact that this wasn't in question) 3. Germany tried this and failed Lets look at the claims from the article: "In the three months to end-September 2023, the South American nation generated all of its electricity from renewable sources" Note that it says "electricity" not "power" Wood Burning and Petroleum Burning, for home heating and agriculture respectively are unrelated to "electricity generation" in this context so this article and the do not cover all possible forms of heat exchange and power generation It is unambiguously good that Uruguay has shown it can replace the use of fossil fuel in it's core energy infrastructure with non-imported, low carbon energy production. This is an unambiguously good news story, there's no reason to try and prove this wrong and doing so only makes you come off as an acerbic pedant, who doesn't want progress unless its perfect and all at once.
- adolph 3y agoAgreed. What Uruguay is doing is interesting and worthy of further study. The linked podcast with transcript linked below goes into more detail about how long it took to build up the program, private/public partnerships, how expected consumer savings are partly negated by expanded usage. There are a lot of moving pieces. In 2008 Ramón Méndez Galain, a particle physicist with no experience in government, was appointed Director of Energy for Uruguay and proceeded to reimagine the country’s electricity grid. In less than a decade, Méndez’s energy transition plan succeeded in freeing the country’s power sector from its growing reliance on imported oil, and achieved energy independence through a diverse electricity mix, approaching 100% renewables. https://kleinmanenergy.upenn.edu/podcast/how-uruguay-went-almost-completely-fossil-fuel-free/ https://kleinmanenergy.upenn.edu/podcast/how-uruguay-went-al...
- toomuchtodo 3y agoHe also did a TED talk. https://www.ted.com/talks/ramon_mendez_galain_this_country_runs_on_98_percent_renewable_electricity https://www.ted.com/talks/ramon_mendez_galain_this_country_r... ("TED: This country runs on 98 percent renewable electricity")
- skymast 3y ago[dead]
- p0w3n3d 3y agoInhabitants of Atacama Desert are also 100% CO2 neutral
- billbrown 3y agoI didn't read the OP because I looked into Uruguay's previously-touted "98% renewable" last month and I doubt anything's changed.[1] I read a great study from 2022[2] and figured out the accounting trickery behind the claims. Basically, the windmills are overbuilt past the demand, which is supplied by mostly hydroelectric and enough natgas. The wind energy is exported to neighboring Brazil and Argentina through interconnects. [1] https://twitter.com/billbrown/status/1714311001569693749 https://twitter.com/billbrown/status/1714311001569693749 [2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421521006248 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142152...
- billbrown 3y agoDownvoted, hah!
- baseline-shift 3y agoCalifornia runs on 100% renewables for 4.8 months each year in a sense too. It has 40% renewables last time I checked I think in 2019. If you assign that to what percent of the annual use, that is the equivalent of everything from Jan 1st-April 24ish California is runing on 100% renewables.
- locallost 3y agoUruguay's electricity was 100% renewable for the last four months, not four months in the last 12 months. In the last 12 months they were over 90%.
- Josethblox2 3y ago[flagged]