Renewable energy covered 100% of Costa Rica's electricity mix in the first 75 days of this year, acording to a release by public electricity company Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad (ICE).
The increase of rain and the resulting well-filled state of the country's four main reservoirs led to an increase in hydropower electricity generation. The rest of the electricity mix was supplied by geothermal, wind, biomass and solar sources. As a result, the country completely forewent the use of fossil fuels power plants. Moreover, the ICE expects renewable energy sources to remain significant in the coming months.
In 2013, renewable energy accounted for about 88% of Costa Rica's electricity mix, including total capacity of 2,731.2 MW and 10,136.1 gigawatt hours of generation. About 70% of that was supplied by hydropower (1,725.3 MW and 6,851 gigawatt hours), according to a report by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (Eclac). Geothermal made up some 15% of the mix (217.5 MW and 1,516.7 gigawatt hours), wind energy around 5% (148.1 MW and 484.6 gigawatt hours), cogeneration about 0.8% (40 MW and 86.3 gigawatt hours) and solar just 0.01 % (1 MW capacity, 1.4 gigawatt hours). Fossil fuel power plants made up some 12% (595.7 MW and 1,196 gigawatt hours.
Popular content
This content is protected by copyright and may not be reused. If you want to cooperate with us and would like to reuse some of our content, please contact: editors@pv-magazine.com.
Share
By submitting this form you agree to pv magazine using your data for the purposes of publishing your comment.
Your personal data will only be disclosed or otherwise transmitted to third parties for the purposes of spam filtering or if this is necessary for technical maintenance of the website. Any other transfer to third parties will not take place unless this is justified on the basis of applicable data protection regulations or if pv magazine is legally obliged to do so.
You may revoke this consent at any time with effect for the future, in which case your personal data will be deleted immediately. Otherwise, your data will be deleted if pv magazine has processed your request or the purpose of data storage is fulfilled.
Further information on data privacy can be found in our Data Protection Policy.