“with wind the single-biggest contributor… Power production costs have declined “by almost half” … And the clean energy sector has created 50,000 new jobs… Ask me what was the impact on the electricity sector in Uruguay after this tragic war in Europe — zero.”
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
53% of power currently being generated by wind, the rest hydro. So there you go. They seem to be doing it, so there’s your answer.
I don’t know how much I trust that website. It states that British Columbia has 100% of its power generation from an unknown source, which it labels as “500 grams per kwhr” equivalent to coal. But we know that 100% of British Columbia’s electricity comes from hydro…
They seem to be using publicly available data.
You can see here the source for the Uruguay https://apps.ute.com.uy/SgePublico/ConsPotenciaGeneracionArbolXFuente.aspx
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.
Exactly, but I’m wondering how Uruguay is planning to go from a “might” to a “definitely” enough biomass production
Biomass as a source of energy has a lot of the same problems as fossil fuels, no? Why is nuclear not on the table while biomass is?
Nuclear does not have the same function than biomass.
A biomass power station is (relatively) cheap to build but the fuel is expensive. So it make sense to have it as a backup and only use it when necessary.
On the other hand nuclear is expensive to build but the fuel is cheap. So building a nuclear power station as a backup does not make sense, it needs to run all the time.
This is the basic ideas, but in practice nuclear is actually beneficial to renewables. The electricity network operator did several scenarios for the French electrical production in 2050. In their scenarios, having around 13% of nuclear in the mix divided by almost two the amount of solar, wind turbines and batteries needed.
You can check it out in real time here: UTE Generation Biomass is not something so actively sought, it’s more of a consequence of other industries here. You are correct that we have other renewable sources that work when wind is not on its peak. There are two hidro plants that can work when demand is large and wind is not on its peak, and they’ve managed to keep this regime even on dry or draught conditions.
We really need to think of biomass as batteries. In both cases, it’s tough to scale up enough for full coverage but we know how to store biodiesel or ethanol, it’s very energy dense. Scattering a bunch of diesel generators with big biodiesel tanks might be a better answer than batteries for when the wind doesn’t blow
It also ensures a market and distribution industry for farming and construction vehicles where batteries may not work
It takes a decade and quite a bit of space to make a tree (for example), it’s technically renewable but the fuel production is very slow. I’m curious how they’re planning to keep that up
Other things grow faster and take up less space than trees. For example most biofuel is made from maize and sugarcane.
By that logic you could also not call the flat thing inside a phone a battery because it can’t feed back into the grid.
It’s a very slow charging battery is all.
Anything that stores energy can be a battery.
