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Costa Rica Goes 75 Days Powering Itself Using Only Renewable Energy
An anonymous reader writes with news about an impressive renewable energy accomplishment in Costa Rica. Costa Rica has achieved a clean energy milestone by using 100 per cent renewable energy for a record 75 days in a row. The feat was achieved thanks to heavy rainfall, which powered four hydroelectric plants in the first three months of the year, the state-run Costa Rican Electricity Institute said. No fossil fuels have been burnt to generate electricity since December 2014, in the state which is renowned for its clean energy policies."
I will sit back and see how this is not possible in the USofA.
OTOH Renewable energy is not something new. Look at the Hooverdam. And there is dessert enough available to put a LOT of sun collectors.
The real issue is that this will require investment in research and that means not making a profit in the next 3 years, which is about the duration of how far a CXO looks.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
or did they go all electric cars and boats too and start cooking on electric? they had a good rainfall.
with this reasoning norway has been 100%+ renewables for a loong time(they generate more renewable energy than they use, and export the rest). sure, they do export fossil fuels too..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Now, they only need to install electric pumps for when it's not raining, and they're 100% renewable forever!
That is about 9500 days Iceland has Powered Itself Using Only Renewable Energy.
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
A bit over 99% of the electricity generated in Norway is from hydro plants, because it has a ton of hydro resources.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Funny I've lived there for over 25 years and never, ever had my car searched. Sure I've been pulled over for speeding. I've also been stopped twice at a road-block aimed at catching intoxicated drivers (like they have almost everywhere in the world including the "free" US). I've been stopped once and asked to provide ID and later learned on the news that there had been a pretty violent crime in my neighborhood. But just stopped to be searched for the hell of it? Never.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Quebec, with 8.2 million people, goes 365 days on hydro all the time.
Well to be fair, there is a certain irony about calling the energy "renewable" when it couldn't be sustained.
Still, it's an impressive accomplishment that they pulled it off as long as they did. It should be noted though that:
1) It's not replicable everywhere at any time.
2) Costa Rica doesn't have particularly demanding energy needs (as the "stupid" guy above pointed out).
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You said "look at Hoover Dam". Okay, I'm looking. I see it's situated in a nice canyon, flooded 100 square miles, and provides less than 1/10,000th of our energy needs. If you go find another 10,000 nice deep canyons, we can flood 1,000,000 miles of land and be okay, until there's a drought.
Since we don't actually have 10,000 canyons, you end up needing to flood basically the entire area between the Rocky Mountains and the Appalachians - I've done the math.
Costa Rica has a population of a few million - think Houston and it's suburbs. They have a couple of dams, which is great when they get heavy rains. Their experience might be interesting to one or two American cities (the ones nearest Niagara Falls, specifically) ; it's nothing like powering the entire United States.
Unfortunately, Costa Rica still allows their police to search all cars at a checkpoint in the middle of the country so any feeling of freedom or closeness with nature is quickly soured.
Gee, that sounds familiar, sort of like what the US currently does with its border checkpoints that are in the interior of the country, and not on the border.
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OK, I think of Houston and it's suburbs. So why do I not see an article where it says that Houston and it Suburbs are 100% green over a 3 month period.
And do not look ONLY at dams, look at a combination of different sources. Solar, water, wind, reduction in usage by i.e changing the way buildings are made, people and goods are transported and a lot of other things.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
In the U.S. the supreme court allows mandatory checkpoints only because they are pre-published where the driver has the ability to be informed and can take a different route.
There is also the fact that the US government defines the "border" as including 100 mile in from the physical border and can pretty well do what it likes in that zone. This "border" conveniently includes where the majority of the population lives. Are You Living in the Government's "Border" Zone?
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You can still deplete your supply of renewables by using more than the refill rate - at least temporarily.
>. So why do I not see an article where it says that Houston and it Suburbs are 100% green over a 3 month period.
Houston doesn't happen to be located beneath a mountain range, where it would get a nice flow of water coming in during the rainy season. Houston also chooses to have affordable electricity available year round. Steady, affordable energy is directly related to all the jobs which Californians are moving to Houston for.
Houston also doesn't happen to have the volcanic fault line that Costa Rica uses for geothermal - less than 1% of locations on earth have that. California does have geothermal potential, the rest of the US does not.
You're spot on about the combination. The US has a couple of places suitable for geothermal, a couple for hydro, etc. If you do the research and the arithmetic, you find that renewables can make a significant impact - 11% to 13% of our total energy needs. That's significant. For the rest, we have the choice of natural gas and other petroleum, or nuclear. At least until we develop some Star Trek quantum generator.
"Renewable" means no finite resource was expended to generate the energy in question
The second law of thermodynamics begs to differ.
/pedantry
Notice how the largest renewable source, hydro, counts as green energy when it suits the enviros, but is anathema the rest of the time.
We should stop using the word renewable for energy like solar wind and hydro. Its not theoretically renewable, but thats not the point. The point is that they don't emit CO2 into the atmosphere, and thats the thing that is going to screw up the climate.
So we should be using the term Non-Carbon-Emitting energy sources. We could even use the acronym NCE but its probably already in use in some other field.
"The second law of thermodynamics states that in a natural thermodynamic process, there is an increase in the sum of the entropies of the participating systems." So how does it beg to differ in terms of a hydro electric power and renewable resources? I quite like pedantry. It opens the eyes of the ignorant. :D
Being good friends with a couple guys from Costa Rica... they're some of the happiest people I know online.
And they're developed *enough*... They have nice computers and phones, they eat well, they make enough money to get by.
Happiness really is everything.
There's a reason why we have both the words "renewable" and "sustainable" - they do not mean the same thing.
Costa Rica will get more rain, which will "renew" the reservoirs behind the hydro dams. It's not raining 100% of the time, and the hydro dams release more volume of water than the rain provides in the same unit time, so it's not completely sustainable. But it is still a renewable resource.
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I'm pretty certain that's redundant, as all "renewable" sources have "unpredictable" problems, except tidal.
- Hydro - dry spell, loss of snow pack
- Solar (PV & other) - oops clouds
- Wind - still day
"unpredictable" is the nature of renewable sources, which is why other baseline or backup sources (such as safer nuclear) remain vital as we figure out how to move away from fossils
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Fossil fuels are also a renewable energy source by that logic.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
Not in the lifetime of our civilization, though. (We could also wait for the next supernova to suck up some uranium, but that wouldn't be practical either.)
Ezekiel 23:20
I lived in Costa Rica for a couple years, most recently about eight months ago. They have a phrase, "pura vida" which could maybe be translated as "the good life", but it's used as a greeting and farewell phrase as well. It's also used as an answer to, "How are you doing?" On the one hand, it seems remarkable that they would be happier than anyone else; broadly speaking I expect people to have the same general experiences anywhere. On the other hand, I spent a few months in Panama and then returned to CR for a holiday, and when I picked up a pizza that I had ordered, the guy said "Have a nice day," that is, "pura vida". And he meant it sincerely. At that moment, the difference in attitude was shocking; I had been used to Panamanians (although I prefer the sobriquet Panamaniacs :P) basically looking at me as a business opportunity at best.
The average Costa Rican does not have a computer, although cell phones are relatively common. Computers are quite expensive, enough to make an import business profitable, but very few people can afford one. There is a 100% import duty on cars, so those are expensive too. They also do a license plate restriction on driving, at least in San Jose. Most have electricity and relatively clean water, although they do have an issue with dumping raw sewage into almost all of the rivers. I wish I could more effectively describe the impoverished living conditions; if you have any specific questions please feel free to ask.
On the other hand, people sure don't care about working hard there. My friends in San Jose tell me that the weekend starts on Thursday, and everyone including the boss is late on Fridays and Mondays. There were as I recall a couple clubs where you paid a $10 cover and drinks were free. If there was paperwork that needed to be processed by the government, let's just say the Vogons would be proud of the Tico bureaucracy. If you needed to have your car repaired by a certain date, the Ticos will of course be delighted to tell you that it will be ready then, but no amount of inducement or cajoling will actually make it ready by a given date. Things happen when they happen, and no one is in a hurry to get anything done or to go anywhere — they call it operating on "Tico time".
However, all that said, I'm a little skeptical of the article. Most of Costa Rica is really rural, and I would be surprised if the national power grid actually extended to all corners of the country. I don't think that the average Tico really cares about environmentalism; to some degree it's a first world problem. The Costa Rican government on the other hand knows that the country basically has no industries; the farming isn't great and I believe tourism is the biggest part of the economy. Costa Rica doesn't have all that much to tour, either: there are no mayan or aztec ruins, and almost nothing in the way of indigenous culture. I heard something about painted oxcarts being a thing, but never saw one. Contrast with Panama's amazing diablo rojos (the buses or the costumes). So some while back they hit upon the idea to market themselves as a destination for "eco-tourism", which involves convincing the rest of the world that they have some sort of unique level of biodiversity. It may even be true. However, they really need to promote the image of being green and eco-friendly regardless of the truth.
If I could make a decent living there it'd be hard not to go back, even though the world is full of things I have never seen before. Whether or not the Ticos are the happiest people, I think that I can safely say that happiness for me is two-for-one mango daiquiris at the Lazy Mon. Pura Vida!
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
That's true to some extent but not on human time scales. Much of the coal was laid down at a time when microorganisms hadn't yet figured out how to break down cellulose so it wasn't decaying to something that wouldn't become coal. That is no longer true.