'Energy independent' Uruguay runs on 100% renewables for four straight months

https://www.ted.com/talks/ramon_mendez_galain_this_country_r... ("TED: This country runs on 98 percent renewable electricity")

the deal is up now btw, so the media is covering paraguay attempt to renegotiate it.

https://www.itaipu.gov.br/energia/geracao

But they don't seem to publish anything on the Brazilian data portal (that's bad), nor they seem to publish anything parseable on their site.

I also couldn't find any breakdown of the energy sold to each country. The Brazilian electric system operator (ONS) has the Brazilian numbers, but I don't know where to get the other ones.

Which is hardly incidental, having access to ungodly amounts of hydro power is the easiest way to run on 100% renewables. Iceland has similarly been 100% (or near enough) renewables for decades, despite more than 70% of its electricity going to aluminum smelters.

Norway similarly runs on 100% renewable electricity because it has enough hydro for pretty much all of it (Norway is the 213th country by population, but something like top 10 hydro producer)

Paraguay has access to Itaipú hydropower, and it certainly powers most of the energy grid, but not all.

There's also the Yacyretá dam, which is jointly held with Argentina, downstream from the Itaipú site on the same Paraná river. It generates quite significant amounts of electricity and Paraguay also uses some of it to power its grid.

And there's also the Acaray dam, which is wholly owned by Paraguay, in operation since 1973.

There's also a dam on the Yguazú river (not the same river than the one with the falls) which is not machinized but otherwise ready to enter production once it's equipped with turbines.

Some isolated locations on the Chaco (northern area) also run on solar power and some also on timber/wood-based plants, but these are rapidly being obsoleted by power lines coming from Itaipú.

With that provision aside, it could be said that Paraguay has been getting its electrity from wholly renewable sources since at least 1983.

And obviously this reduces the consumption of electricity, making it easier to cover the electricity needed with renewables.

Doesn't take anything away from it, it's still great that this is happening.

When you look into it then Desertec would have been a huge waste of resources. The issue at this point is not generation - its storage and to a lesser degree transport.

Of course there is sun in Germany. Yes, there's less. But then it's also cooler which makes the solar panels more efficient. What matters is if it's economical to use solar panels there, which it is. In summer, where some areas will use quite a bit of AC, there's more daylight hours than regions further south. In winter, if you have vertically mounted panels, a nice effect you can get is that the snow reflects extra sunlight from the ground to the solar panel.

Fun fact, even the airport in Longyearbyen in Svalbard, Norway - an island close to the north pole - has solar panels. They're mounted vertically on the walls, since the sun is never very high in the sky. There's no sun at all in winter, but in summer there's sun 24/7.

https://sunpower.maxeon.com/int/case-study/energy-arctic-cir...

It's surprising how much production they get even that far north: "the PV system produces as much as 70 percent of what is typically produced in Germany"

So please don't use your subjective impression about how bright you feel it is to gauge the viability of solar. I can tell you from personal experience, it's not very bright in Svalbard even in summer.

BTW, much of the energy need in winter in northern climates is for heating. It's surprisingly effective to store thermal energy over several months. So it's actually viable to dump heat from excess solar in a thermal reservoir in summer, and use that heat in winter.

If it's windy renewables skeptics will tell you how little power is being generated right now by solar panels.

If it's sunny renewables skeptics will tell you how little power is generated by wind turbines right now.

This is partly because skeptics are gonna skeptic but also it's also because sun and wind anticorrelate way more than most people think, reducing storage requirements down to quite reasonable levels (such that pumped storage/hydrogen can economically satisfy most grids).

citation: https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-g...

It rains here.

however with a 5kw array, and a 13kwh battery, we are self sufficient for at least 6 months of the year (as in 0kw from grid) and at worst 40% in the midst of winter. Today I have generated 10kwhr and its only 14:00.

Germany should have no real issues with solar production. I mean its not great, but its not anywhere near as bad as you imply.

https://www.statista.com/chart/31016/volume-of-global-fossil...

Which brings us to the problem: The CO2 shouldn't be in the atmosphere right now: If you burn wood today and the CO2 gets removed again by new plants within the next 100 years, that's still a problem.

The Nordics, perhaps unsurprisingly, are the lead innovators in this space.

Countries that have both the money and the investment-friendly culture to insulate their houses tend to be the rich ones.

Wood burning is becoming a rare thing here tho.

https://www.worlddata.info/america/uruguay/energy-consumptio... (3.4 MWh) https://www.worlddata.info/america/brazil/energy-consumption... (2.5 MWh) https://www.worlddata.info/america/argentina/energy-consumpt... (2.6 MWh)

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" ?

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.

The only question is what end of the conversational spectrum are the lies offloaded?

Potential for energy supply parity with non-renewables? Population life support (the third rail)?. True carbon math vs the feel-good type? Or like you note, actual renewable energy implementation in contrast with what is purported? Expect a shuffle, with a multi-agenda authoritarian streak under all.

When "save group x" loses its political appeal generally, toward justifying politics, then "save the Earth" is an emotionally attractive and infinitely "renewable" excuse for acting anti-democratically.

And, and it's a big "and", if those renewables themselves weren't just feasible because of subsidies (like how, in non-renewables, nuclear is also uncompetitive when considering the whole course of life of a factory and not just the bare production) or built/maintained/etc through ample use of fossil fuels.

As a further step up, there’s “produce enough excess electricity to potentially produce the gas we use”, then the end goal where that excess production actually is used to produce that gas (that likely will be with much lower gas usage), either in the country or abroad.

I doubt they’ll ever be truly independent for their energy needs. The country is too small for that, as it would require producing solar cells, wind turbines, etc. inside the country.