Which makes the title "Energy independent" and "100% renewables" all the more infuriating. (To the point where i'm wondering if it's not bait for people who have a clue about the topic.)
If you have lots of mountains and lots of space to put solar panels / windmills, you can get a lot of your electricity from renewables sources, which is great for a lot of applications.
(If you can have nuclear power, it's not "renewable" per se, but it's very low on carbon, which is useful in itself, whith the usual caveats.)
But the "small" issue is that tractors in the fields and trucks moving fertilizers and chemicals and produces around are, at the moment, mostly relying on oil.
So, at the moment, being "100% energy independent with renewables" means you have to make the small compromise of "not eat food."
Where is the "Tesla of tractors" ? Which EV company is seriously addressing "freight" ?
If you want to consider the energy balance of food production then every country runs 99% on renewable energy as plants collect solar power at a scale that absolutely dwarfs everything else. Even a very low estimate of 1,549,600 km2 of crops * 1% efficiency from photosynthesis * 15% capacity factor is ~2,000,000 TWh / year vs 27,000 TW from electricity. Add in forests providing lumber, grass feeding cattle, and plankton feeding fish etc and the numbers get much larger.
As such total energy balance isn’t a particularly useful metric. Instead we use subsets of total energy such as the electric grid and 100% renewable is perfectly valid in that context.
Of course, I agree that "total energy balance isn’t a particularly useful metric", given the impact of solar energy ; but picking the right subset is important.
I would argue that:
* excluding "the energy coming from the sun" is fair game, given that we as a society have very little impact on it
* excluding "the energy not transferred as electricity" is not fair, and misleading, given that it represent a minority of the energy for which the society has a choice.
If [1] gives roughly the correct numbers, Urugay is using ~200TJ/y, and ~40TJ comes from electricity. Not insignificant, and it's the right strategy to replace as much of the remaining 80% by renewables through electricity.
But as long as 20% !== 100%, and as long as people will mis-title articles for no good reason, people will have to correct headlines.
Where are you getting 200Tj total and 40Tj for electricity? The chart lists 2020 as Hydro 14,738 TJ, biofuels and waste 93,709 TJ, Oil 87,756, Solar/Wind/etc 21,375 TJ, Natural gas 2,504 TJ.
So renewables are (14,738 + 93,709 + 21,375 )/ (14,738 + 93,709 + 87,756 + 21,375 + 2,504) = 59% of total energy.
However that rather overstates energy from oil. ICE engines are only like 25% efficient but hydro is only counting the fraction of potential energy actually converted to electricity. And even before that refineries waste a lot of energy that’s in oil when producing gasoline.
PS: Sanity check electricity consumption is listed as 11.83 TWh * 60m/h * 60s/m * 1j/s = 42,588 TJ/year
Correct, I messed up my units, and miss-interpreted "biofuels and waste". Sorry. Graph is for:
Topic: "Energy supply"
Indiator: "Total Energy supply (TES) by source".
Looking at the stacked chart, for 2020, the sum is above 200 000 TJ (not 200 TJ as I wrote mistakenly). It's propably about 210 000 TJ.
Then, for electricity, I summed "Wind, Solar, etc..." (21 375 TJ) and "Hydro" (14 738 TJ).
I assumed that "Biofuels and Waste" (93 709 TJ) was used mostly for heating as opposed to electricity generation, and neglected it.
It's not entirely the case, though ; in the "Electricity Generation by source", you can see that 2 752 GWh where produced using "biofuels and waste" out of the 811 + 2752 + 4094 + 5476 + 462 = 13595 GWh of electriciy (~20%.)
So I guess that we should add ~20% of those 93 709 TJ, and say that roughly (again, I'm doing ballpark computations here) 60 000TJ out of more than 210 000 TJ.
Still, 28% !== 100%, isn't it ;) ?
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PS: Out of curiosity, from https://www.iea.org/countries/france, my home country would be at around 4% renewables, and 40% "non fossil" (given the share of nuclear in electricity), but as usual, we're outliers...
Ok, but again don’t forget about efficiency for biofuels.
If their Waste power plants are 30% efficient and produce 2.752 TWh that took / 0.3 * 60 * 60 ~= 33,000 Tj of fuel + 42,000 Tj of electricity from other sources. So, (33 PJ + 42 PJ) / 210 PJ = 36% of total primary energy supply used for electricity.
Which again shows why comparing pre conversion efficiency numbers to post conversion efficiency numbers gives rather silly results.
Every country has "lots of space to put solar panels". Except maybe city states that are all skyscrapers. But for now there's no shortage of space where you could put solar panels without them being in anyone's way. Put them on every roof, over every parking lot (where they help keep cars cool in summer), over ever bike path (where they help keep cyclists dry in the rain).
Countries want (rather understandably) to produce some of the electricity they consume. I don't know how connected the Urugayan grid is to neighboors.
If anything, this makes the "Energy independent" part even more dubious :D (really, apart from China - or maybe USA, I don't know which country could be "independent", given that you need both fossil deposits and the right metal mines to build an energy system...)
We're almost all in the same boat, and we all have to do our best. Inter-dependence without over-concentration is a feature, not a bug :D
> ...nuclear power, it's not "renewable" per se, but it's very low on carbon...
Sorry, but no. The whole life carbon emissions (WLCE) of nuclear are deeply contested and estimates from academic studies tend to be much higher than those of governmental bodies like the UK's committee on climate change and the IPCC's estimates.
If you have lots of mountains and lots of space to put solar panels / windmills, you can get a lot of your electricity from renewables sources, which is great for a lot of applications. (If you can have nuclear power, it's not "renewable" per se, but it's very low on carbon, which is useful in itself, whith the usual caveats.)
But the "small" issue is that tractors in the fields and trucks moving fertilizers and chemicals and produces around are, at the moment, mostly relying on oil.
So, at the moment, being "100% energy independent with renewables" means you have to make the small compromise of "not eat food."
Where is the "Tesla of tractors" ? Which EV company is seriously addressing "freight" ?