2y ago

Portugal just ran on 100% renewables for six days in a row | Canary Media

www.canarymedia.com

Portugal just ran on 100% renewables for six days in a row

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This is by far the best news I've heard in a long while. Well done, Portugal.
I looked into this more, the 2022 data tells a much different story than the article:
https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/portugal#how-much-electricity-does-the-country-consume-each-year
hard to believe they've basically just returned to 1985 levels of renewables for electricity generation.
- In 1980 gdp per capita of Portugal was lower then that of Ghana! They had massive economic growth since then and the country industrialized very late especially by European standards. That is why you see the electricity production more then double over that period. Hydro was basicly the big electricity source at the time, but there is limited potential. So thats why its share was going down.
- So what's your point?
  
  It's important to have an accurate understanding of objective reality. That's reason enough.
- No chart I looked at on that site says that
  
  Look for "Portugal: How much of the country’s electricity comes from renewables?" in the bottom quarter.
- That looks like they use something like 75% fossil fuels? I guess the posted article is only taking about the grid, which is a small portion of overall energy usage?
  
  The main drivers of energy use are typically going to be transportation, home heating, electrical generation, and industry.
  One of the sliding scales that you have to be very careful of when implementing green energy policies is if your electrical costs go up, then you can end up taking people who were previously using renewable energy to eat their homes and push them into using fossil fuels.
  One guy I knew was heating his home using 100% renewable energy from hydroelectric, but then the electric company started building a bunch of solar panels and wind farms that weren't generating electricity during the times that it was needed, so costs went up substantially. When he moved from electric to propane, the cost difference was so much that he paid for the entire system and all the fuel for the year in one month of not paying for electric heat.
  One really interesting thing about the page that I linked, is that in 1987 the same percentage of electricity generation was renewable as today, Which was followed by a massive drop and a swing to rely on fossil fuels.
- Is it hard to believe or have you not thought about it hard enough?

14 comments