Visitors Now:
Total Visits:
Total Stories:

By Anonymous (Reporter)
Contributor profile | More stories

Story Views
Now:
Last Hour:
Last 24 Hours:
Total:

4 GW Of Solar Projects Approved Or Considered In Chile

Friday, January 11, 2013 14:21

% of readers think this story is Fact. Add your two cents.

(Before It's News)

This post comes to us from Planetsave.com. For more along these lines, visit Planetsave or some of its most popular categories: Global Warming, Science, Going Green Tips, Animals, or 10 Friday Photos.

Chile’s solar power capacity is currently very small, but if recently approved plans come to fruition, a massive surge is coming. The country’s renewable energy agency (Centro de Energias Renovables) has greenlighted 3.1 GW of photovoltaic projects and reportedly is considering another 908 MW.

Image Credit: Jorge GG, Wiki Commons

Currently, less than 5 MW is in operation or under construction, according
to one source. However, another says 155 MW of non-hyropower was under construction in mid-September 2012. Only about 4 MW of this is likely to be solar, as Chile is also developing its excellent wind resources, as well as biomass. The government has set some ambitious goals, such as 20% of energy from renewables by 2020 from 9 GW of new clean power plants.

At any rate, having approved a huge amounts of plans doesn’t necessarily translate into the same number of finished operational facilities. The chief barriers to turning documents into functional power plants are financing and permitting. To address the first barrier, the Executive Director of CER, María Paz de la Cruz, was seeking a new funding instrument.

An NRDC analyst made a significant point about the upside of setting very ambitious goals, even if they are not met: “But if just two-thirds were to become operational, that would still be roughly 6,650 MW of capacity from renewables, or very nearly one-third of the total 20,000 MW that the government says the country will require by 2020.”

Some South America countries — Uruguay for example — are going after renewable energy development with an admirable zeal. Doing so is not only good for reducing climate change emissions, it is likely to be beneficial economically because it also decreases dependence on foreign oil.

4 GW Of Solar Projects Approved Or Considered In Chile was originally posted on: PlanetSave. To read more from CleanTechnica, join thousands of others and subscribe to our free RSS feed, follow us on Facebook or Twitter, or just visit our homepage.