Seven countries now generate 100% of their electricity from renewable energy
the-independent.com524 points by mpweiher 14 hours ago
524 points by mpweiher 14 hours ago
> Albania, Bhutan, Nepal, Paraguay, Iceland, Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of Congo produced more than 99.7 per cent of the electricity they consumed using geothermal, hydro, solar or wind power.
Let's head to electricitymaps.com !
Albania (https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/AL/live/fifteen_min...)
- On 2026-04-12 16:45 GMT+2, 22,67% of electricity consumed by Albania is imported from Greece, which generates 22% of its electricity from gas. Interestingly, Albania exports about as much to Montenegro as it imports from Greece.
Bhutan:
- 100% hydro, makes perfect sense
Nepal:
- 98% hydro, a bit of solar for good measure
Iceland:
- 70% hydro, 30% geo
Paraguay:
- 99,9% hydro
Ethiopia:
- 96,4% hydro
DRC
- 99.6% hydro
So, the lessons for all other countries in the world is pretty clear: grow yourselves some mountains, dig yourselves a big river, and dam, baby, dam !!
(I'm kidding, but I'm sure someone has a pie-in-the-sky geoengineering startup about to disrupt topography using either AI, blockchain, or both.)
I guess somewhat of a fun fact: Albania has rented(!) two floating(!) oil-powered power plants near the city of Vlöre that are there in case of emergency. The last time they were really needed was in 2022 (if I remember correctly), but these days they're not turned on any more than they need to be to make sure they're operating properly. That very expensive backup system is basically the only non-renewable source in the whole country, and most of the time it's just sitting there doing nothing.
Being powered almost entirely by hydro means that the system is highly susceptible to droughts, so then they either have to spin up those oil plants from time to time or import electricity from abroad. I think it's also worth pointing out that nothing really changed because of climate change, the decision to rely on hydro was made in the 90s. The country used to have its own oil power plant that it heavily relied on before that decision, which slowly produced less and less until it was shut down for good in 2007. Some images of it from 2019: https://www.oneman-onemap.com/en/2019/06/26/the-abandoned-po...
Sri Lanka used to rely on hydro, with oil as a backup, and has added a lot of coal.
I wonder how many other countries are increasing non-renewable output?
Sri Lanka has only one coal power plant (construction began 2006), and the later coal project was canceled.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Sri_...
Not increasing but cancelling plans on phasing out. Here in The Netherlands, an absolutely minuscule country of ~18 million people, two coal plants will remain online that previously would've been phased out.
> I think it's also worth pointing out that nothing really changed because of climate change, the decision to rely on hydro was made in the 90s.
Why do you think it is worth pointing this out?
To assuage any implication that the conversion was based on that concern?
It's helpful to know that there are economics and environmental concerns outside of an existential threat, to galvanize a country's momentum.
And this is an expected problem with renewables that can be engineered around. It's unlikely the whole world has a drought at once during a calm night, so developing ways to transmit power long distances will be important.
Or just use nuclear as base load, and battery storage as much as you can.
The economics of new nuclear plants don't make sense. They take too long to build and cost too much. By the time a new plant is ready, alternate sources (likely solar + battery and long-distance HVDC) will have eaten its lunch.
> They take too long to build and cost too much.
The global average to build one is ~7 years. People have been saying they take too long to build as an excuse for not building them for what, two decades or more? It seems to be taking longer to not build them than to build them.
> By the time a new plant is ready, alternate sources (likely solar + battery and long-distance HVDC) will have eaten its lunch.
Neither of those have the same purpose. Solar + battery lets you generate power with solar at noon and then use it after sunset. It doesn't let you generate power with solar in July and then use it in January. More than a third of US energy consumption is for heating which is a terrible match for solar because the demand is nearly the exact inverse of solar's generation profile both in terms of time of day and seasonally.
HVDC is pretty overrated in general. It does nothing for the seasonal problem and it's expensive for something that only provides a significant benefit a small minority of the time, i.e. the two days out of the year when the entire local grid has a shortage but a far away one has a surplus. It's also hard to secure because it inherently spans long distances so you can't have anything like a containment building around it and you end up with an infrastructure where multiple GW of grid capacity is susceptible to accidental or purposeful disruption by any idiot with a shovel or a mylar balloon.
The issue with them in addition to time is a huge capital expense that needs to be amortized. Nobody wants to hold 30-80 year debt on giant capital projects that could be rendered obsolete.
For commercialization, solar makes more sense as there is a much better return on capital.
If I were king, I’d do socialized power and have the government capitalize and own the nuclear plants, and bid out the operations to private entities. Government has better debt economics and doesn’t care about return in monetary means.
Even then, relatively small tweaks to tax law and some grid investment would create a solar boom at lower cost. Every Walmart parking lot and some road infrastructure should be covered with solar. Interstates could be utility and generating corridors - they aren’t because federal law makes any multimodal use very difficult.
> It doesn't let you generate power with solar in July and then use it in January.
That’s not necessary. Solar panels are so cheap that you can massively overprovision for winter and still come out ahead of nuclear.
> Solar panels are so cheap that you can massively overprovision for winter and still come out ahead of nuclear.
Only you don't. In latitudes that get winter, solar output is only about a quarter as much in the winter as in the summer. You often hear things like "twice as much in the warmer half of the year" to try and stuff October and March into the "colder half" and disguise how screwed you are in December and January. Worse, if you electrify heating then it's not just that solar supplies less in the winter, you also have more demand in the winter.
By this point you're not just overbuilding by a bit, you'd need five times as much or more in January as in July. "Five times as much" is already over what it costs to use nuclear. Then it gets worse, because you now have a price of zero during the summer and even the spring and fall because of the massive oversupply and lower demand, so you now have to recover the entire cost of the overbuild during the three months when you're generating the least amount of power.
Then it gets worse yet, because heating demand is higher at night and we haven't yet added the cost of storage.
Lets put down some Swedish numbers.
During the coldest winter month, solar energy produce (as per statistics from the solar industry in Sweden) somewhere around 3-7% of the amount produced during the warmest month. Households also consume around 2-4 times the amount of energy during the coldest month compared to the warmest month. Sweden is a country where only a small minority have air conditioning installed at home.
Those are the worst month vs the best month. Overall the winter is not that bad, but it is still pretty bad for solar. Talking with people who has had solar installed here, the general story is very similar. During periods where it do produce the market price is already exceptional low, so it isn't returning a major saving. When the market price is high, the output is low, forcing them to be connected to the grid and pay whatever the electrical company demand during the highest market peaks, as well as taxes and grid fees which themselves has increased to match the cost of high variability.
All this looks very different in countries with much warmer climates and where the major energy consumption from households are air conditioning.
The nice thing is Sweden has lots of hydro, which works as natural long-term energy storage. Every bit of solar you generate means water is kept in the dam for use later in the year.
You also can't ignore wind power which should be part of any plan to "overbuild".
Yeah but:
1. Sweden is just about the worst case, there's very few countries/people that far north.
2. There's this genius invention called "wires". HVDC has transmission losses on the order of 3.5% per 1,000km. You don't have to colocate the solar.