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This little Spanish island will run on 100% renewable energy within months
By the end of this year, a little Spanish island called El Hierro will get 100 percent of its power from renewable sources.
El Hierro, a tiny Spanish island off the west coast of Africa, has done away with fossil fuels. In just a few months time, the entire island will be running on 100 percent renewable energy – from the power of wind and water.
According to journalist Lauren Frayer at NPR, the 278 kilometre squared island, with a population of just over 10,000 people, is billing itself as the world’s first energy self-sufficient island that’s never been hooked up to a power grid. Not that it was ever actually logistically possible to hook El Hierro up to Spain’s power grid, because of the topography of the surrounding sea bed, so the residents have had to figure out a different way.
First they tried importing almost 7,000 tonnes of diesel fuel to power their various electricity generators, but that wasn’t a long-term solution, being a super-expensive, drawn-out process that harms the environment. So over the past 12 months they started integrating a $110 million wind and water turbine farm, called Gorona del Viento, into their power supply. “By the end of this year, the plant will generate all of the island’s energy needs of up to 48 gigawatt hours per year,” reports NPR.
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