[mikece]

Interesting that Colombia is currently powering more than 70% of their electrical consumption on hydropower. They currently have about 65 TWh of hydropower capacity; the total feasible generation potential is around 200 TWh. Makes then an interesting country to host such talks.

[bluGill]

Good for them, but for most of the world there are no good hydropower locations left. And even when they exist building them is a local ecological disaster.

[DangitBobby]

Practically everything we do is a local ecological disaster.

Pumped storage hydro electricity is one of our least ecologically devastating options and we are not even remotely close to exhausting locations we can put them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...

[timbit42]

Maybe they will have to divert their hydropower funds into solar or wind.

[scythe]

Most of South America has worked like this for decades. Hydropower is king even in Venezuela. It's altruistic on their part, but it may have reduced their long-term economic growth. Viewed in terms of GDP per capita, South America is a laggard. But if you change the denominator and look at GDP per kWh (energy intensity) they are surprisingly close to the rich world.

There is a hidden upside to all this hydro: it could potentially be upgraded to pumped storage and support a massive expansion of solar and wind. However, no SA country has such a forward-looking energy policy.

[hatthew]

Do you have a source for GDP/kWh? Last time I was curious I dumped some raw stats (copied from wikipedia) into excel and venezuela was among the bottom three. I recall being surprised that there wasn't any strong correlation between GDP/kWh and any other obvious metric like technological development, population, land size, climate, etc.

[scythe]

It's on Wikipedia, sorted backwards:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_in...

Venezuela is an unusual case because their economy has been a disaster for the last half decade. And I agree that the data aren't so straightforward.

[hatthew]

Yeah looks like Venezuela is definitely an outlier in south america. French Guiana is also a big outlier in the other direction.