[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.