
Costa Rica has run on 100% renewable energy for 300 days - Biba89
https://vt.co/sci-tech/innovation/costa-rica-just-run-100-percent-renewable-energy-300-days/
======
mikece
It's interesting how incredibly low France's CO2 output is, mainly thanks to
their investment in nuclear power. And while uranium isn't renewable, I think
we've got 300,000 years worth of it available. Think we can crack fusion or
ultra-high-efficiency solar by then?

~~~
rabidrat
We've got 300k years of fissile material, at current usage rates, which is
only a small fraction of our current energy usage. If we magically went to
100% nuclear fission for energy (which is not reasonable for personal
transportation, at least), and continued to increase energy consumption per
business as usual (developed economies not reducing, and developing economies
rapidly catching up to developed usage per capita), then it would not last
nearly as long, by 2 orders of magnitude. Also I think that estimate imagines
efficient breeder reactors and "complete burning" of the material, and does
not take into account our current incredibly wasteful techniques of using 5%
of the available energy and burying the rest in an unrecoverable mountain
sludge.

I know that a few thousand years still feels like a long time, but with
nuclear fission, it is truly the most non-renewable resource, being formed
only in stellar explosions. Let's put aside the science fiction of asteroid
mining nuclear fuel for now; I think a reasonable argument could be made to
_not_ spend nuclear fuel for our primary energy needs. If we have dreams of
ever being able to do mass interstellar travel, nuclear material is the only
fuel we have so far with reasonable energy density for the speeds and
distances involved. (Of course some will say "nuclear fusion" or "light
sails", to which I say, we should defer mass consumption of fissile material
until we have a reasonable expectation that those methods are viable).

~~~
yostrovs
"We" now and "we" ten thousand years from now are very different people. Those
in the future will laugh at your concerns for them. It's as if ancient
Egyptians would worry about whether we, now, have enough flood plain space to
harvest crops.

~~~
fsloth
Nuclear fuel is a non-trivial resource. There is no basis for thinking we will
ever find anything better.

Scientific progress is not a law of nature. It needs very specific environment
to thrive. Before scientific revolution kicked in the pharaohs would have
easily adjusted to europe and elsewhere.

No one can predict whether there is an infinite amount of scientific progress
ahead of us or will we hit a wall.

~~~
godelski
There are plenty of areas to look at for new energy generation just within
particle physics alone. Not to mention that we're at the finish line with a
net positive fusion reactor (I don't know a single fusion scientist that
doesn't think iter will work).

Scientific progress may not be law, but there isn't a thousand year period
where humans haven't advanced.

~~~
hermitdev
I don't mean to be negative, but we've been hearing fusion is 5 years out for
how long?

Point is: you can't really put a deadline on R&D. We won't really know when it
works, until, well it does. And who knows how long it will to take
commercialize once we do get it working.

I mean, Musk said fully autonomous vehicles in 2015 were easy and would be
solved in 2 years. 4 years later, Tesla'd are killing people by driving into
highway barriers or broadsiding a semi trailer. Ambitious? Yes. Are we there
yet? No. I think autonomous driving is a worthy goal and we should keep
working at it. Same with fusion. But do I believe the projected timelines? No.
Doubt that I'll see fusion as a power source in my timeline. Maybe never fully
autonomous vehicles (I mean trully fully). And I'm still under 40. Maybe I'm
overly pessimistic, but I think a lot of people underestimate the true
difficulty of some of these projects.

~~~
DuskStar
> I don't mean to be negative, but we've been hearing fusion is 5 years out
> for how long?

Fusion is an amount of _money_ away more than an amount of _time_.

~~~
hyperbovine
Unless you believe markets are completely inefficient I just don’t buy this
argument. Think about the reward awaiting the person or company that finally
cracks fusion power: trillions of dollars in wealth; the gratitude of an
entire planet; instant, everlasting fame, and so on. So, ample incentives
already exist. No, the reason we haven’t solved fusion is that it’s a hard
problem, and the right genius(es) have yet to come along.

~~~
chmod775
Companies are just too risk averse for expensive moonshots like this.

Construction costs _alone_ for ITER are estimated to be $22 to $65 billion
dollars. This doesn't even factor in the cost of actually running it after
that or the cost of feeding all the scientists involved in it (which receive
government funding through their respective countries).

You can probably count the amount of companies with enough cash lying around
to finance this on one hand. And then they'd still need the people for it.

Even once ITER is completed you still don't have a realistic product to sell.
ITER is of no use besides getting us one step closer to fusion energy.

And at the end of it we may just realize that fusion is never going to be cost
efficient compared to other energy sources.

That's no risk any sane company will take.

As always the free market will wait until all the groundwork has been laid by
taxpayer funded scientists, and even then only make a move if there are
massive government subsidies - as has happened and is still happening with
fission energy.

The free market is much better at low-risk and incremental innovation. Stuff
like this? Not so much.

~~~
hyperbovine
> Companies are just too risk averse

The risk calculation is: expected cost minus expected reward. The expected
reward is astronomical (no pun intended!), so you're simply restating my
point: fusion is not likely to work regardless of how much money we throw at
it. Amazon's R&D annual budget exceeds $20b. That's one company spending half
an ITER _a year_. The private sector has no problem coming up with those sums
for ideas it deems promising. The problem is that industry has decided, quite
rationally in my opinion, that fusion power is not one of those ideas.

~~~
chmod775
> That's one company spending half an ITER a year.

No it's not even close to the total cost of ITER. It may just pay for the cost
of actually physically constructing it.

The R&D that got taxpayer funded scientists to the point where we are able to
construct it at all is going to be a multiple of that.

> The problem is that industry has decided, quite rationally in my opinion,
> that fusion power is not one of those ideas.

So you're saying that things like fission reactors, spaceflight and GPS,
treatments for some rare and not-so-rare diseases, the Human Genome Project,
ARPANET, everything that came out of CERN, etc. were bad ideas just because no
private company could be assed to develop and build those first?

No. It's a fact that all of these were vitally important to get our species
where it is today, even though they would have looked like a terrible
investment of time and money from the perspective of a private company. Today
private companies have happily entered some of those spaces that have been
pioneered by government funded scientists.

It's true that many moonshots fail. That's why they're called (sometimes
literal) moonshots. But it's important to try anyways so we can advance as a
species.

And most of the time we learn a lot even if we fail.

------
bmmayer1
This has to be flagged for the quality of the news source.

There are multiple typos in the article itself (the last word is
"recieveing"). The homepage headline as of writing this comment is
grammatically challenged: "The ‘Black Mirror’ tech billionaires are investing
in to try and live forever"

This article provides no sources, no footnotes, no authoritative evidence
other than "purportedly..." It editorializes throughout and reads like it was
written by a Romanian SEO bot.

Do we have any standards on HN anymore, or do we just post and promote
articles with clickbait headlines that make us feel good?

Also, the post is from 2017. Come on, people.

------
ardit33
Albania has been run on 100% renewable energy (hydric) for 50+ years now.....
the only thermo-central power plant built, has been uncompleted and in-
functional for decades due to the high cost of fuel.

Usually smaller countries that have the resources can pull it off. (hydric in
the case of Albania, as it is 70% mountainous and has a lot of rivers crossing
it).

The downside is that is very much rainfall dependent. There are years where it
could actually export energy, and there are years that it has to import it to
meet demand.

[https://i.redd.it/ul78e5rqdvt21.png](https://i.redd.it/ul78e5rqdvt21.png)

For more in Europe:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/bg6hnz/electricity_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/bg6hnz/electricity_production_from_nonrenewable/)

~~~
punnerud
Norway have produced on average more energy than we consume the last 70years,
but we can not call ourself green anymore because the CO2/energy certificates
are bought by Facebook, Apple and other large energy consumers in Europe that
want their green stamp. The problem is that Norwegians still feel they are
green because we produce so much green energy, and don’t understand (?) the
link with money. Because of that Facebook and Apple (++) get these
certificates super cheap.

~~~
konschubert
Yep, the certificate trade is a trick to sell green energy twice.

------
jm4
And the air still smells like car exhaust in pretty much every city. I've been
there many times and was actually there earlier this week. I've been all over
the western half of the country. They have an insane tax on cars - I think
it's like 20% of the value of the car - which means a bunch of people drive
old beaters and cheap dirtbikes. They are noisy and dirty. I had an easier
time sleeping last time I went to NYC than I did in Palmares with all the
motorcycles riding around. They require you to bring your car in for regular
emissions tests, but I don't know how that's working out because a bunch of
the cars there are a lot dirtier than what we have in the US. Once you get
away from the cities and cars it's beautiful though.

~~~
alkonaut
Is 20% really insane? Do they also have a VAT? A VAT is often 20 or 25% so
that seems like a normal tax on any product, not only cars. It’s probably high
for not-very-rich country though (compare e.g with Norway’s sometimes over
100% tax).

~~~
jm4
It's high enough that people are driving dirty old beaters instead of
something newer that pollutes less. You could probably make an argument that
it does more harm than good. I think they also have VAT or it's coming soon.
There have been protests about it since late last year. A couple weeks ago
they were at it again and truckers clogged all the roads going 1 kmh.

~~~
Voloskaya
What are you even talking about? VAT has existed in France for decades. The
20% tax has nothing to do with cars, its just the regular VAT you pay on any
transformed good. People driving old cars also paid VAT when they bought it
(it might have been closer to 17% back in the time). And finally the yellow
vest movement has nothing to do with VAT.

~~~
jm4
Pretty sure you are missing something. We are talking about Costa Rica, not
France. There have been protests in Costa Rica about a new tax. Truckers have
been clogging up the roads.

Costa Rica has high taxes specifically on cars. It’s a car import tax and
every new car has to be imported. Someone there told me 20%, but a quick
search looks like it’s 45-85%. Whatever it is, the result is most people are
driving around in old cars that have higher emissions than newer cars. A lot
of the stuff on the road is over 20 years old.

~~~
Voloskaya
Apologies, I was 100% wrong :)

------
pier25
It's a great achievement to produce 100% of your electricity from renewables
but this title is misleading. Cars, planes, trucks, etc, still run on fossil
fuels. Costa Rica also heats water with gas, like most countries.

Also, Costa Rica has always been a low emissions country. In 2014 they had 1.6
per capita, well below the 4.3 world average.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions_per_capita)

------
pmoleri
> As Costa Rica is a small country, it's much easier for it achieve these
> lofty goals, than say, countries like China and the USA, which are larger in
> size.

Does this affirmation actually hold? Is it really easier just because it's
smaller? In this particular case Costa Rica has a lot of natural resources
that enable this. But in general I think that these changes depend more on
willingness than country size.

~~~
rossdavidh
It struck me the same way. Presumably, you have a lot fewer people to work at
pulling this off, also. That would be like saying, "of course it's hard for
Costa Rica to achieve these lofty goals, with only a few million people to
support it, whereas China has over a billion people". The particular
resources, yeah, maybe, but that particular statement seemed silly.

------
HissingMachine
It is very impressive, but when looking at a broader picture you come to see
that electricity prices are fairly high, the temperate climate means mostly no
heating or air conditioning needs, and there is very little energy-intensive
heavy industry like steel mills or such.

But every country has its unique features and must play with the cards they
are handed. So this still is really neat.

~~~
theli0nheart
Costa Rica has a tropical climate.

> _Because Costa Rica is located between 8 and 12 degrees north of the
> Equator, the climate is tropical year round._

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Costa_Rica](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Costa_Rica)

~~~
HissingMachine
Another wikipedia article states this, which I based my assumption to.

>Mild climate and trade winds make neither heating nor cooling necessary,
particularly in the highland cities and towns where some 90% of the population
lives.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Costa_Rica](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Costa_Rica)

~~~
swebs
And here's a final wikipedia article that probably explains why he corrected
you

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperate_climate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperate_climate)

~~~
HissingMachine
Fair enough should probably have used the mild climate term used in the
wikipedia article to avoid confusing to climate zones.

------
ecocentrik
It's even more impressive when you notice the article is from 2017.

------
SlowRobotAhead
People celebrating this might want to go to Costa Rica and see it for
themselves.

I was traveling the west coast and power went out nightly Quepos to Sierpe. I
think 5 or 6 times during dinner in Playa Dominical.

100% renewable is great, but let’s not pretend they have even two 9’s uptime.

------
toomuchtodo
ElectricityMap.org: Costa Rica

[https://www.electricitymap.org/?wind=false&solar=false&page=...](https://www.electricitymap.org/?wind=false&solar=false&page=country&remote=true&countryCode=CR)

------
JoeAltmaier
Costa Rica uses a tiny fraction of power, per-capita, of a developed nation.
Their solutions may not be applicable.

~~~
BurningFrog
Cost Rica is pretty developed.

It is far richer than Somalia or Bolivia.

------
l0b0
It's sad how every such article is flooded with excuses basically amounting to
"it's not identical to the our situation in every single particular, so it
couldn't possibly work for us." The world would be a much better place if
people were willing to learn from people outside their bubble.

------
4ntonius8lock
Part of this is the fact that Costa Rica is an energy exporter.

Handling consumption peaks means either using fossil fuels, or vastly over
producing electricity during non-peak hours (which in a free market can cause
odd incentives such as negative energy prices). CR as an energy exporter, they
generally produce way more than the country consumes, so they get to handle
the peaks in a way that is unique to places that have energy importing
neighbors.

I will add, this electricity is produced by a government run monopoly that
keeps prices extremely high, which has chocked out much of the manufacturing
done in the area.

Even tradition, old school Costa Rican brands which supply the local market
have been moving to Nicaragua and Panama (Jack's snacks for example)

Still, the achievement is great news and commendable.

------
icebraining
(2017), which is even more impressive.

~~~
rmateu
More recent source in April mentions:

> Only with renewable energies, this country has been operating for more than
> 6 months. The heavy rains in the region have allowed the country to
> completely renounce fossil fuels, and to feed almost entirely on the
> electricity generated from 4 hydroelectric plants – with a little extra help
> from geothermal, solar green energy and wind projects. With a little more
> investment, this trend can be maintained over time.

[https://thecostaricanews.com/costa-rica-is-running-only-
with...](https://thecostaricanews.com/costa-rica-is-running-only-with-
renewable-energy-in-the-last-months/)

------
gnerix
The grid in Costa Rica is also highly unreliable and many communities will run
off oil & gas generators for extended periods of time (in addition to the
comments that a majority trucks, busses, cars still run off of non-renewable
sources.

------
intopieces
(2017), please

------
prlambert
This article is from 2017

------
rotten
Snarky conservatives who never heard of energy storage would say - "And nights
too?"

~~~
toomuchtodo
Costa Rica has a large hydro capacity, so nights too :)

~~~
rbritton
Fun fact: Last I heard, Washington state does not consider hydro to be
renewable [0]. I don't know if any other states are similar.

[0]: [https://shiftwa.org/its-time-wa-considers-hydropower-as-
rene...](https://shiftwa.org/its-time-wa-considers-hydropower-as-renewable-
energy/)

~~~
fintechpwmMEdev
It shouldn't - the damage dams do to our fisheries is devastating. We likely
wouldn't need fish farms and genetic modified salmon if we didn't have so many
dams.

It would be interesting to see what effects the New Deal had on our fish
populations... [https://livingnewdeal.org/new-deal-
categories/infrastructure...](https://livingnewdeal.org/new-deal-
categories/infrastructure/dams/)

~~~
godshatter
I would consider them renewable as long as the river keeps flowing. The
question of whether or not we should use them because of the damage to fish
populations is another question entirely.

~~~
NegativeLatency
Not just the fish are impacted by the dams
[https://www.oregonlive.com/news/2018/11/feds-approve-plan-
fo...](https://www.oregonlive.com/news/2018/11/feds-approve-plan-for-state-
officials-to-kill-sea-lions-at-willamette-falls.html)

> The state applied to kill the sea lions “because their analyses showed that
> the high levels of predation by sea lions meant there was an almost 90%
> probability that one of the upper Willamette steelhead runs would go
> extinct,” the wildlife agency said in a statement.

------
devoply
A country of 5 million people with mostly a tourism based economy.

~~~
DanTheManPR
It would be just as accurate to say "a mostly semi-conductor manufacturing
based economy", given that both are around 5% of GDP.

~~~
mpiedrav
However, Intel closed the fab business here years ago, when they decided to
reduce expenses even further by moving production to Malaysia. They are still
around with some software-related projects.

Our Costa Rican economy is, more than ever before, based on providing
services: customer support, technical support, financial services, web and
games development, digital arts, ecotourism, etc.

------
danielfoster
This is pretty awesome. I just came back from a trip to Costa Rica and
although I found the country a tad boring and overpriced, I was thoroughly
impressed with the knowledge and respect locals have for nature.

~~~
nabeards
Did you travel outside the normal tourist areas?

