Good job Portugal! Six days is six days, not six months, but we're talking about an entire country here. And the record was just tripled in duration. Portugal is on a trajectory to shift almost...
Good job Portugal! Six days is six days, not six months, but we're talking about an entire country here. And the record was just tripled in duration. Portugal is on a trajectory to shift almost completely to renewables faster than much of the rest of the world.
The new record was set between 4 am local time on October 31 and 9 am on November 6 – 149 consecutive hours, breaking 2019’s record of 131 hours – during which 1,102 Gigawatt hours (GWh) of renewable energy were produced. This ended up being more than the country needed, with both industrial and household consumption only reaching 840 GWh.
Although this record doesn’t mean that fossil fuel plants weren’t operating at all during this time, another national record set during this time demonstrated that may well be possible in the near future. Beating a previous high of 56 consecutive hours, Portugal also managed to go natural gas-free for 131 hours in a row, and for 95 of those hours, produced enough clean energy that some could be exported to neighboring Spain.
Portugal is something of a trend-setter when it comes to renewable energy. Whereas the rest of the European Union didn’t pledge itself to become carbon-neutral by 2050 until 2019, Portugal did so in 2016. It had also aimed to stop the use of coal as a fuel by 2030, and with the last of its coal plants having shut down nearly two years ago, it achieved that goal nine years early.
As with its coal plants, Portugal aims to decommission all of its natural gas-fired power plants by 2040. Earlier this year, it also set out plans to double the country’s solar and hydrogen energy capacity – the country is already the home of Europe's largest floating solar park.
As of Dec 2022, Portugal has a renewable nameplate capacity of about 16.6 GW, though that amount has increased a good bit in the past year. Most of that is from hydro and wind power, and a bit of solar. Apparently, the country is often able to supply a majority of its electricity from renewable sources for months at a time and wants to consistently generate 80% of its electricity renewably by 2026. Aggressive. Good to see it.
Good job Portugal! Six days is six days, not six months, but we're talking about an entire country here. And the record was just tripled in duration. Portugal is on a trajectory to shift almost completely to renewables faster than much of the rest of the world.
As of Dec 2022, Portugal has a renewable nameplate capacity of about 16.6 GW, though that amount has increased a good bit in the past year. Most of that is from hydro and wind power, and a bit of solar. Apparently, the country is often able to supply a majority of its electricity from renewable sources for months at a time and wants to consistently generate 80% of its electricity renewably by 2026. Aggressive. Good to see it.