It’s also got a total population smaller than a lot of large cities, just over 3 million, and not much industry (where most energy is used). “Easy” to have almost 100% renewable energy in that case. Still very impressive.
Uruguay is around the global average for electricity consumption per capita, about 10kwh a day.
Hydro is obviously very helpful but transition to a renewable grid is basically straightforward for most countries, noting the real challenges in diverting fossil fuel energy use to renewable electricity use
A renewable grid (excluding nuclear and hydro) is definitely not a straight forward engineering problem because energy sources such as wind and solar are intermittent. That requires the grid to be backfilled by a non intermittent source of energy, and/or storage of energy from intermittent sources (using for instance a lot of batteries.) That storage can get complicated at scale, especially with inverters feeding directly into the grid. (Batteries are DC, the grid is AC). Lots of complex mathematics to prevent surges and brownouts. Nuclear + renewables would be a great solution but almost no one wants to build nuclear power plants.
It’s also got a total population smaller than a lot of large cities, just over 3 million, and not much industry (where most energy is used). “Easy” to have almost 100% renewable energy in that case. Still very impressive.
Uruguay is around the global average for electricity consumption per capita, about 10kwh a day.
Hydro is obviously very helpful but transition to a renewable grid is basically straightforward for most countries, noting the real challenges in diverting fossil fuel energy use to renewable electricity use
A renewable grid (excluding nuclear and hydro) is definitely not a straight forward engineering problem because energy sources such as wind and solar are intermittent. That requires the grid to be backfilled by a non intermittent source of energy, and/or storage of energy from intermittent sources (using for instance a lot of batteries.) That storage can get complicated at scale, especially with inverters feeding directly into the grid. (Batteries are DC, the grid is AC). Lots of complex mathematics to prevent surges and brownouts. Nuclear + renewables would be a great solution but almost no one wants to build nuclear power plants.
Electricity storage requires investment in static pumped hydro or batteries but it’s not an engineering mystery.
I can’t take anyone who suggests nuclear seriously - why would nuclear be great?
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