Until only 15 years ago, Uruguay needed to import oil from Argentina to meet its electricity demands. But the situation has reversed now. Ramón Méndez, climate change policy head, Uruguay, said, “We used to be reliant on electricity imports from Argentina, but now we export to them. Last summer, we sold a third of our power generation to them."
Strong decision making and sensible use of available natural energy sources such as good wind, reliable solar radiation and large biomass generation from agriculture resulted in decarbonising measures that are showing inspiring results. The country's energy investment, largely for renewable and also liquid gas makes up for 15 per cent of its GDP. International firms are now fast securing contracts for wind farms in Uruguay. The competition has resulted in pushing down bids and cutting electricty generating costs by more than 30 per cent within the last three years.
Uruguay's transport sector though still relies on oil, which makes up about 45 per cent of the total energy mix. But other industrial sectors such as agriculture is majorly powered by biomass cogeneration plants.
Uruguay has proven that renewables without any backing of coal and nuclear plants are well capable of meeting more than 90 per cent of the country's electricity demands and that this is achievable by providing conducive environment to investers and a strong partenership between the public and private sector.
Uruguay sets a fine example for the delegates participating in the Paris climate summit and hopefully inspires other world leaders to put their countries on the same path of renewables dependency.
The World Bank and the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean and WWF recognised and applauded Uruguay for its carbon footprint mitigation efforts and named it among its ‘Green Energy Leaders' last year.
Source: The Guardian.
