“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.”
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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.
One of the main reasons the big players want (or even need) as many people globally to remain dependent on it as possible - control.
That and petrolheads in politics. Who is so slow in renewables? USA and Germany.
Carter tried to show the US the future but then he got replaced with Bad Human 1.0 Ronnie and it was all trashed.
Ironically it’s the US and German subsidies that kickstarted solar and brought costs down.
Germany has the most renewables per capita of any European nation and have been heavy investors for a long time now.
Yep, lock the victim nations into a petroleum payment plan
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.
Wait until we have our first Wind War.
That’s what we call it after eating beans all day
We call it Aladdin’s revenge. Turning the blanket into a flying carpet and all that.
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.
Cloud seeding? That’s very much a real thing, although its effectiveness is disputed.
A bit of info about an “experiment” on the subject https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Popeye
…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.
There are ways to store the power generated by renewables.
There are, but none is feasible today when it comes to mass storage. Or is there one?
There is actually. Pumped Storage hydro uses the energy as it’s generated from renewables and uses it to pump water up into a reservoir. Once you have the water pumped, it’s just a matter of letting the water back out through turbines. Their efficiency is somewhere around 80% which is pretty good.
For that you need both suitable hills and water. Also it’s not that huge, it certainly depends on the reservoir capacity. If it was a feasible solution, then you’d see them everywhere, but you don’t. Ask Germans about it.
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?
Well done Uruguay.
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.
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.
Not too much biomass fortunately. But even with some googling I can’t seem to find how anyone plans to produce enough biomass to keep this going
What is that unknown bar meant to be?
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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.
Exactly, but I’m wondering how Uruguay is planning to go from a “might” to a “definitely” enough biomass production
I have no idea but I’m really interested to find out.
Actually one comment of many here set me on the right track! I’ll reply again when I find out!
Gotta get to the airport now tho, laters!
Biomass as a source of energy has a lot of the same problems as fossil fuels, no? Why is nuclear not on the table while biomass is?
Nuclear does not have the same function than biomass.
A biomass power station is (relatively) cheap to build but the fuel is expensive. So it make sense to have it as a backup and only use it when necessary.
On the other hand nuclear is expensive to build but the fuel is cheap. So building a nuclear power station as a backup does not make sense, it needs to run all the time.
This is the basic ideas, but in practice nuclear is actually beneficial to renewables. The electricity network operator did several scenarios for the French electrical production in 2050. In their scenarios, having around 13% of nuclear in the mix divided by almost two the amount of solar, wind turbines and batteries needed.
But nuclear is scalable while running, allowing you to ramp up and down as needed to cover for the intermittent nature of renewables without relying on fossil fuels or similar. Isn’t that why adding nuclear into the mix is such an effective strategy?
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!
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
Other things grow faster and take up less space than trees. For example most biofuel is made from maize and sugarcane.
eyy thank you! That makes sense! You seem to be the only one to actually try to answer my question :/
I know where to look further! thank you!
No problem :) It was interesting to read a bit more about it. I reckon hemp would be the ultimate one though - super fast growing, will grow in most climates and really versatile for making fibers.
And the extra material wouldn’t go to waste! That is a good idea
Also how is biomass a battery? You can’t put energy back into a forest
Lots of devices still use batteries that do not recharge.
Yea, that’s the issue. For something to be sustainable, you need to replenish the fuel source. Biomass can be, but you need a lot of it, but we also need it for food
By that logic you could also not call the flat thing inside a phone a battery because it can’t feed back into the grid.
Other way round, you can take biomass and turn it into electricity easily. But you cant easily turn electricity into biomass. (it is easy on a phone to go both ways tho, google “USB c OTG adapter”)
It’s a very slow charging battery is all.
Anything that stores energy can be a battery.
technically yes, well an accu really. But that might be different in English. The question is whether that sunlight charging of that carbon store can keep up with our consumption
Ever heard of AA batteries?
Amazing
how those middle east prince now can buy more hookers and supercars if u guys not using oil
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?
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)
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.
You’re right! There’s nothing wrong with efficiency and teaching people to be less wasteful, however I believe including it in your argument for renewables means muddying the message.
Talking about getting production to 100% renewable puts the onus on governments and power companies to change.
Talking about efficiency is about getting consumers to use less, and allows energy producers and politicians to point the finger at people leaving their lights on unnecessarily rather than getting on with the job of making more renewable energy.
This is of course speculation on my part
Efficiency doesn’t have to be consumer led, though. It could be stuff like higher building standards and subsidies for insulation, subsidies for heat pumps for AC and hot water, even seemingly trivial things like free/subsidised LED bulbs can add up (there is still a significant amount of non-LED bulbs in the wild in many countries).
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?
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