Portugal Now Gets 45% of its Electricity From Renewable Energy

August 11th, 2010 by Susan Kraemer

Five years ago, when 17% of Portugal’s energy came from renewable energy – about like California now – the government made a bold decision to aim for 45% during the next five years – by 2010.

Sounds impossible, right? Yet, according to Elizabeth Rosenthal at the NYT, they will have achieved their goal by the end of this year.

“You cannot imagine the pressure we suffered that first year,” said Manuel Pinho, Portugal’s minister of economy and innovation from 2005 until last year, who largely masterminded the transition, adding, “Politicians must take tough decisions.”

The new power plants, mostly wind and hydro, will add a small percentage to ratepayers bills (about 5% more than the US average electricity rate rises of around 6% a year) but within a decade that initial investment expense should be gone, and ongoing rates will be much lower, due to the fuel-free nature of renewable energy. As a result the nation’s electricity rates should drop within ten to fifteen years and then remain low.

Like China, the Portuguese government restructured and privatized former state energy utilities to create a grid better suited to renewable power sources.

Like the rest of Europe, under Europe’s cap and trade system the nation is subject to a price on carbon, making it cheaper to build clean energy than dirty energy. In 1990, the base year for the Kyoto accord that Europe signed, Portugal had a simple agrarian economy.

Now, along with Scotland, Portugal has shot to leadership in enabling the development of wave energy. It set a feed-in tariff for wave energy that will pay 260 euros per megawatt-hour for the first 20 MW installed. The government has a very practical approach to radical innovation. They say, “Let’s do it: then we’ll see.This a problem; this is not”, says WaveRoller CEO John Liljelund. Portugal nurtured the first ocean power testing centers near Peniche, off the coast in Europe for wave and tidal energy.

Since the very capital-intensive first prototypes of wave and tidal power are still largely at the R&D stage, ocean power has yet to bring much power to the grid. But a thriving wind industry, created from scratch in the formerly agrarian society, is not only supplying the nation, along with hydro power, but now exporting wind farms to less developed nations such as the USA.

Energias de Portugal, the country’s largest energy company, owns wind farms in Iowa and Texas, through its American subsidiary, Horizon Wind Energy.

Portugal’s next goal is 60% by 2020. They should find that easy. When you consider the extraordinary feat of adding 28% in only 5 years to get to 45%, adding another 15% more over 10 years looks like a walk in the park.

Image: An Oyster prototype

Susan Kraemer@Twitter

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Tags: portugal

About the Author

Susan Kraemer writes at CleanTechnica, CSP-Today, PV-Insider , SmartGridUpdate, and GreenProphet. She has also been published at Ecoseed, NRDC OnEarth, MatterNetwork, Celsius, EnergyNow, and Scientific American. As a former serial entrepreneur in product design, Susan brings an innovator's perspective on inventing a carbon-constrained civilization: If necessity is the mother of invention, solving climate change is the mother of all necessities! As a lover of history and sci-fi, she enjoys chronicling the strange future we are creating in these interesting times. Follow Susan on Twitter @dotcommodity.

http://www.enalava.com/ graphic design careers

I definitely understand everything you have said. In reality, I browsed throughout your several other articles and I believe you happen to be absolutely right. Best wishes with this blog.
http://ecotretas.blogspot.com Ecotretas

A very biased story. For a portuguese interpretation, please see my reply at http://ecotretas.blogspot.com/2010/08/portugal-new-york-times.html

Ecotretas
http://www.energy4all.coop Clive

It’s about time we stopped the UK’s wind energy plans being derailed by NIMBYs and forged ahead in the Dunkirk Spirit….NOW! :-))
Gregory Norminton

This happened because of political courage: the will to endure negative headlines for a couple of years in return for decades (!) of public benefit. There is simply no hope of seeing such federal efforts in the US because the body politic belongs to Big Carbon. The US is a captive state – and the whole world is paying for it.
Karl

Nice! I wish the US would get going a little faster on this. Although the initial investment must not have been cheap I’m sure that they will be much better off financially in the long run. With one financial crisis after the next having 45% of your energy on the cheap end must come in really handy.
CC

Did the NYT just happen to take the portuguese goverment’s word for it?

Because considering how corrupt and totalitarian the current portuguese administration has become, I am not entirely surprised if they either fudged the numbers or of course, considering the Energias de Portugal is the only energy supplier in Portugal, largely due to a crony-like mentality, in which the goverment protected that very same company from competition and kept every one else out, so when they actually privatized it, it was the only company left.

That’s how it works and EDP, basically has to sit down with the portuguese goverment and being the only active enery supplier, EDP, in order to keep energy prices low, lower than what the market dictates, the portuguese goverment has to pay them a huge amount plus tax, which will in turn overtaxes the entire population, thus dragging us further in debt.

I’m not trying to be a negative Nancy, but the portuguese goverment, which has been run by socalist thugs for 14 years, especially under PM José Sócrates and his cabinet have been known to be, for the lack of a better term, liars and have resorted to vicious tactics to silence oponnents.

Mr. Manuel Pinho, for example, headed the Ministry of Economy, a completely useless goverment entity that only serves to act as a middle-man in every single major industry operation(especially in the private sector).

I think the New York Times is overly optimistic over something that might not be true.
http://www.kiwano.ca Sofia Ribeiro

Hi Susan,

Thanks for sharing this! I wonder why we haven’t seen this type of initiatives along the West Coast.

Best,

Sofia
sola

Sounds quite amazing.