This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I actually never thought of it like that, if you're not partaking in the trade of fossil fuels, you are removing yourself from a lot of potential conflicts and "who support who" ordeals.
One of the main reasons the big players want (or even need) as many people globally to remain dependent on it as possible - control.
That and petrolheads in politics. Who is so slow in renewables? USA and Germany.
Carter tried to show the US the future but then he got replaced with Bad Human 1.0 Ronnie and it was all trashed.
Germany has the most renewables per capita of any European nation and have been heavy investors for a long time now.
Yes, I think that one of the side effect of the war in Ukraine will be a big increase of renewables energy in Europe.
European countries started to realize how fragile their energy supply is and how dangerous it is.
Sadly, in the meantime it also mean a surge of imports of fossil fuels from other countries and reopening extraction sites in EU. Reducing fossil fuel dependency really is the top priority of EU, not only for ecology but also for peace and for the economy.
Wait until we have our first Wind War.
That's what we call it after eating beans all day
We call it Aladdin's revenge. Turning the blanket into a flying carpet and all that.
...Except China, where most renewables are produced.
Except once you have the turbines and panels, you don't have to keep importing resources to run them. Sure, you might need parts for maintenance, but if things go south it's a lot easier to reverse engineer parts than to find new oil suppliers.
Only because they produce them the cheapest and in the largest quantities (which goes hand in hand).
Basically any country can produce solar panels and wind turbines. Both technology and resource wise.
Looks like that's just the grid? I'm sure there's more to go for transportation and eliminating the need for generators and gas, but this is a great start!
does anyone ever assume that it's anything other than the grid when it comes to some article like this?
electricity is't the majority of the energy consumed in nearly any country.
it's a easy way to keep confusing less vigilant people by calling electricity as energy.
Just call things the way they are.
You're right; 2/3 of worldwide energy is actually waste heat.
https://www.businessinsider.com/most-energy-still-comes-from-oil-2015-10
Here's the chart from 2007: Waste heat / losses are in the top right, although it doesn't show the transport sector losses which are higher than for coal generation.
What this means is that when we fully electrify all sectors, by using renewable energy such as wind and solar, our total energy generation capacity will only need to be about 1/3 to 1/4 of what we currently produce today to fulfill our current energy needs. That's huge.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but electrifying a process doesn't automatically make it not produce waste heat, right?
I mean I doubt any reasonable person would think that literally every household in Uruguay has replaced their gas stove with an electric/induction stove and that they use only AC/heat pumps and everyone has switched to an electric car and every bus has been converted to a trolley and or Battery/Hydrogen Electric
and a bunch of other stuff.
Well done Uruguay.
Meanwhile in South Africa, we're having blackouts while being almost completely dependant on coal.
I remembered reading many years ago about large solar plants in SA and I wondered what happened to that. Apparently Zuma happened: From a world leader in renewables, to years behind, thanks to Zuma and his cronies.
You know you need a lot of sun and wind for renewable energy?
Pretty sure South Africa has too little of it unlike those sunny and wind torn countries like, don't know... Germany?
Plus coal is more expensive power.
Amazing
53,000 barrels/day
It looks like Uruguays oil consumption has flatlined since about 2014. I can't find any newer data than 2016 but here's my source:
i think evs are still too expensive for the common uruguaian(?) wallet. so they still use oil for cars. but 4 months 100% renewables is great news.
Presumably mostly for transportation sector. EV adoption should lower that.
how those middle east prince now can buy more hookers and supercars if u guys not using oil
I wonder how much of that is biomass, and how they're planning to grow enough vegetation to renew iy
https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/UY
You can select 30d, year... And see how much was used for that period.
Not too much biomass fortunately. But even with some googling I can't seem to find how anyone plans to produce enough biomass to keep this going
This aspect is a big aspect of intermittent renewables energy that is often dismissed: you need piloted energy as a backup, the amount of piloted energy depend on how oversized is the intermittent energy installation.
For renewable piloted energy there is two options that I know of: hydro and biomass. Uruguay is using both.
It's something to keep in mind if we want to reach 100% renewables without nuclear, we need to increase the biomass electricity production.
On another hand we are already using a lot of biomass to produce ethanol and biodiesel. A lot of land is also use for animal feed, so I'm a society with less ICE cars and less meat eated we might have enough land to grow biomass for electricity generation.
