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Costa Rica Has Run on 100% Renewable Electricity for 299 Days

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Re: Costa Rica Has Run on 100% Renewable Electricity for 299 Days

#221

Post by asdff »

silicon2401 wrote: post #51
bberenberg wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe one of the reasons is they don't have defense spending per-se. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Force_of_Costa_Rica#His... They let the US handle all of that for them, and they spend funds on power. This isn't to say that they're an infrastructure paradise. A region I visited had poor roads and internet connectivity.

This is my understanding. With the US supporting them, it makes certain things a bit easier. I've also visited and depending where you go, it certainly isn't some kind of sci-fi utopia. Crime and poverty are still tragically rampant. But we should certainly celebrate their renewable achievement as that's a massive victory for any nation.

Crime and poverty are rampant in parts of the US too

Re: Costa Rica Has Run on 100% Renewable Electricity for 299 Days

#222

Post by asdff »

macspoofing wrote: post #178
belval wrote: post #3

Is there an easy answer as to why Costa Rica is doing so well? They seem to be a bit of an exception in Central/South America. EDIT: From Wikipedia "It is known for its long-standing and stable democracy, and for its highly educated workforce, most of whom speak English. The country spends roughly 6.9% of its budget (2016) on education, compared to a global average of 4.4%. Its economy, once heavily dependent on agri…

>Is there an easy answer as to why Costa Rica is doing so well? Yes. Anytime you see an article that says "X country runs on 100% renewable" ... it's hydro-electric power every time. So if your country is blessed with a type of geography that makes hydro electric power viable, you're golden! Solar and Wind cannot power a modern economy without fossil fuel back-up.

France at least has a huge amount of nuclear power. I wish we saw more reactors built in the U.S., it would certainly kill a lot of birds with a single stone.

Re: Costa Rica Has Run on 100% Renewable Electricity for 299 Days

#223

Post by asdff »

wil421 wrote: post #35
leesalminen wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live part-time in Costa Rica. Brownouts occur 1-4x every day. It’s usually just a few seconds and not all that bad. The worst part is when you have to restart the dishwasher.

A lot of people in Costa Rica have generators on standby for blackouts and brown outs.

I live in California and I have an APC on standby for when my power company cuts power too. They've already encouraged that I refrain from using my AC during the heatwave of course. People think we in the U.S. are far removed from the experiences of people in other countries, but we aren't really. That's just our biased perception. A lot of LA looks just like parts of central america.

Re: Costa Rica Has Run on 100% Renewable Electricity for 299 Days

#224

Post by silicon2401 »

asdff wrote: post #221
silicon2401 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my understanding. With the US supporting them, it makes certain things a bit easier. I've also visited and depending where you go, it certainly isn't some kind of sci-fi utopia. Crime and poverty are still tragically rampant. But we should certainly celebrate their renewable achievement as that's a massive victory for any nation.

Crime and poverty are rampant in parts of the US too

That has nothing to do with a conversation about Costa Rica.

Re: Costa Rica Has Run on 100% Renewable Electricity for 299 Days

#225

Post by asdff »

belval wrote: post #14
leesalminen wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live part-time in Costa Rica. Brownouts occur 1-4x every day. It’s usually just a few seconds and not all that bad. The worst part is when you have to restart the dishwasher.

I've read about expats praising Costa Rica for its low costs and beautiful properties that foreigners can buy. How was your experience there?

I don't think foreigners can get a mortgage though, you might have to buy property outright.

Re: Costa Rica Has Run on 100% Renewable Electricity for 299 Days

#226

Post by gknapp »

belval wrote: post #3

Is there an easy answer as to why Costa Rica is doing so well? They seem to be a bit of an exception in Central/South America. EDIT: From Wikipedia "It is known for its long-standing and stable democracy, and for its highly educated workforce, most of whom speak English. The country spends roughly 6.9% of its budget (2016) on education, compared to a global average of 4.4%. Its economy, once heavily dependent on agri…

I don't have an answer in particular, but I was surprised to discover that Panama is doing just as well, if not better, in most macro-measures (HDI, median income, per capita GDP PPP, etc.) than Costa Rica. Took me by surprise!

Re: Costa Rica Has Run on 100% Renewable Electricity for 299 Days

#227

Post by asdff »

asien wrote: post #184
cbmuser wrote: post #173

Costa Rica is a small country with hardly any industry and abundant amounts of hydro power. The country’s whole electricity demand is about 1.82 GW according to electricitymap.org with around 1.5 GW from hydropower and the rest mostly from geothermal power. 1.82 GW is a little more than a single EPR reactor. Just for comparison.

Just for comparison, France has 25 GW of hydro electricity , it’s the second largest hydro producer in Europe behind Sweden. Hydro only cover 15% of France total electricity demand. It’s indeed all about scale.

I wonder how these numbers compare per capita. I'm assuming the average french person uses more electricity than the average costa rican. Both in terms of electric transit in france and the cooler winters.

Re: Costa Rica Has Run on 100% Renewable Electricity for 299 Days

#228

Post by asdff »

trefgin wrote: post #49

The thing that really pisses me off is that governments in the past worked SO HARD to argue that renewable energy could never work.

Nixon actually wanted to build 1000 nuclear power plants in the U.S. by the year 2000. Today there 60. Governments of the past didn't argue against renewable energy, they gave up on renewable energy in the face of political opposition, which ironically at the time came from the anti-nuclear left.

Re: Costa Rica Has Run on 100% Renewable Electricity for 299 Days

#229

Post by azernik »

pier25 wrote: post #167
gamegoblin wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The book "Why Nations Fail" and the followup by the same authors "The Narrow Corridor" paints a fairly convincing picture that the success or failure of many modern Latin American countries is directly correlated with the extent to which the Spanish colonialists were able to enslave/subjugate the indigenous population, and the types of societies and institutions that followed that initial seed. For example, in modern…

I haven't read those books, but a priori it sounds like cherry picking. Mexico for example had a revolution which gave the land to the people and is a country that, over a century later, is still struggling with corruption, ignorance, superstition, etc. I've been living in Mexico for 12 years and IMO it all comes down to poor education like the grandparent comment by belval suggested. As an example, take the current…

Revolutions are not as effective as they claim at overturning the basic structure of society - not without some very serious application of coercion at a grassroots level.

For the Mexican case specifically, the revolution did not replace the landowning political elite, but installed a different subset of them. A succession of presidents from the landowning class slow-walked land reform (we're talking single-digit percentages of land redistributed per decade), mostly motivated by the fear of Zapatista rebels rather than commitment to equality.

Cárdenas was probably the first seriously pro-reform president (mid- and late-30s), but the old landowners remained wealthy and preserved a good chunk of their holdings. (For political reasons, he focused on foreign landholders.) This meant that the next landowner-friendly president a few years later created a land-leasing system that de facto returned control of large collective farms to the landowning class.

See also how the (non-revolutionary) emancipation of serfs in the Russian Empire didn't change much, since serfs had to take out loans to compensate their former masters. Social hierarchies and power balances remained, despite a change in form.

Re: Costa Rica Has Run on 100% Renewable Electricity for 299 Days

#230

Post by azernik »

groby_b wrote: post #211
fastball wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like many social problems, this is actually a coordination problem, and can be easily boiled down to a tragedy of the commons situation. Everyone would prefer to not have an army, because most of the time you don't need them but they're still expensive to maintain and when you do need them they're even more expensive. But if nobody has an army then the bad actors can form an army and take over everybody else. So ever…

The fascinating thing is that the "well the bad guys could form an army" argument sounds logical, but really isn't. You can't secretly recruit and train several 100,000 people. The closest we've ever come to seeing this happen in real time was probably with German rearmament in the 20s and 30s, and they were telegraphing for decades what they were doing. It does however raise the other problem - if people are willing…

Germany is actually a very illustrative example. They started remilitarization in earnest in 1933, Britain and France started around 1936, and those few years of head start let Germany trounce everyone around for the first few years of WWII despite their inferior industrial base.
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