How Uruguay Relies Almost Completely on
Held up as a case study for successfully transitioning away from fossil fuels, Uruguay now generates up to 98% of its electricity from
But given that Uruguay's GDP was just $41.95 billion in 2010, the government was wary of funneling an estimated $7 billion of public money into the huge renewable energy projects that would have to be undertaken in order to transform the grid. Instead, the leftist party chose to ask private companies to take on much of the financial risk.
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 map of Uruguay's electrical grid today is starkly different from that of 2008, when the majority of power was generated at a few hydroelectric dams north of Montevideo and the rest at a handful of fossil fuel plants in the capital. It's now possible for the entire grid to run several hours a day entirely on wind power.
“It was difficult for us to cope,” Ramón Méndez Galain, a professor at the University of the Republic in Montevideo, Uruguay, said in an interview with NPR. He is one of the architects of the energy revolution in that country. “It was difficult to get electricity.
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