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EDITOR IN CHIEF- ABDULLAH BIN SALIM AL SHUEILI

Despite drought, Costa Rica’s electricity is clean

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Sebastian Rodriguez -


Despite a harsh drought this year, Costa Rica — which relies heavily on hydropower — has been able to keep its electricity production almost entirely renewable.


The dry spell, which ended in May, was the first big test of an ambitious push for clean energy, said Javier Orozco, planning director at the Costa Rican Electricity Institute (ICE), the state-owned power and telecoms provider.


The Central American nation needs clean electricity to meet its climate goal of achieving net-zero planet-warming emissions by 2050. A renewable electricity supply is one of the “most important advances” towards freeing the economy from fossil fuels, according to a national decarbonisation plan launched in February.


Other focus areas are adopting cleaner public transport, improving waste management, and expanding the country’s forests.


But the clean power has come at a cost - heavy investment in excess capacity that is driving up the utility’s debt levels, energy researchers said. Over the last four years, Costa Rica has generated more than 95 per cent of its domestic electricity from renewable energy. In 2018, nearly three-quarters came from hydropower, official data showed.


This year’s drought threatened that record - but strong wind production, the country’s second biggest source of clean electricity, combined with water rationing from dams means about 98 per cent of power is still expected to be produced cleanly in 2019.


“After these critical months, we don’t think we’ll need more thermal production (using fossil fuels),” Orozco told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.


In the driest summer period from January to April, Costa Rica generated 97 per cent of electricity from renewable sources, he noted. That was despite drought hitting rivers hard, with some already dry by January and all suffering “exceptionally low” water levels, putting a lot of stress on hydropower generation, Orozco said.


But Jose Daniel Lara, a researcher at the University of California Berkeley, said Costa Rica’s main vulnerability lies not in whether it can keep generating enough clean electricity as climate change hikes drought risks, but in its finances.


To maintain its supply of renewable energy in dry periods, the utility must have twice the hydropower capacity installed than it uses regularly - and that is costly, Lara said.


In recent years, the ICE has bet on wind energy to reduce its dependence on water to produce electricity. — Reuters


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