Uruguay imports its oil, so it had a problem. Demand for energy in the country had grown by 8.4% the previous year and household energy bills were increasing at a similar rate. The 3.4 million-strong population was becoming restless. Lacking alternatives, President Tabaré Vázquez was forced to buy energy from neighbouring states at higher prices, even though Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay had a mutual aid agreement in case of emergency conditions.
To escape the trap, Vázquez needed rapid solutions. He turned to an unlikely source: Ramón Méndez Galain, a physicist who would transform the country’s energy grid into one of the cleanest in the world.
Today, the country has almost phased out fossil fuels in electricity production. Depending on the weather, anything between 90% and 95% of its power comes from renewables. In some years, that number has crept as high as 98%.
Sam Meadows
A good illustration of how to turn a crisis (the Oil Shock of 2007–08) into an opportunity to overhaul energy generation towards multiple goals: drastically reducing emissions of greenhouse gases, while at the same time cutting dependence on fossil fuels and their volatile prices. There is considerable effort involved (from finding land for wind farms to connecting new plants to the grid and securing backup energy sources when renewable power generation is lower than demand), but solutions are available. Once renewable systems are up and running the ongoing costs are lower and the country can develop without being affected by future energy shocks. The key ingredient is evidently vision and political will, to get the process going and to see in through – something that is sorely lacking in the US…
The biggest challenge, however, was to change the “narrative” about renewables. Back then, sustainable energies were still surrounded by many misconceptions, says Galain: they were too expensive, too intermittent or would raise unemployment – and changing these stories proved vital to getting buy-in from all levels of society.
No one believed we could do it. We needed new solutions. We needed to do things differently, he says.Today, even members of that cabinet say to me:When you were saying those things on TV in 2008, we were thinking, how are we going to explain this when we fail?Galain says there needed to be a “strong national narrative” to make it work.
I told people this was the best option even if they don’t believe climate change exists. It’s the cheapest and not dependent on crazy fluctuations [in oil prices].
Norway underwent a similar transformation triggered by comparable conditions (the 1970s energy crisis), but the country is still an important producer and supplier of fossil fuels, so I can’t give them much credit for being a role model for climate action. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in early 2022 triggered another energy crisis for the European Union, but it remains to be seen how much these pledges to wean off fossil fuels will stand the test of time. So far, the EU has diversified its fossil fuel imports away from Russia, but that’s still a long way from achieving “energy independence”.
The good news is that renewable energy capacity is rapidly expanding worldwide – well, worldwide with an emphasis on China, which added almost half of the world’s new renewable energy capacity in the 2017-2022 period. As with electric vehicles, a sustained centralized policy is driving rapid growth in areas where most people wouldn’t have expected China to compete or be an important player.
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