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Amid the largest global shift in history to a clean power generation matrix, the president Andrés Manuel López Obrador maintains its policy of rescuing the Federal electricity commission (CFE) establishing its preponderance of 54% of energy generation regardless of the technology used or if energy transition objectives and international agreements on reducing greenhouse gas emissions through electricity production are postponed .
Just in November of this year, the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland, has increased the pressure to end fossil fuels, and coal in particular, with the signing of three multilateral commitments to gradually abandon electricity generation with hydrocarbons, responsible for 25% of CO2 emissions.
On the one hand, 23 countries pledged for the first time not to build new coal-fired power plants to accelerate the transition to clean energy, bringing that total bloc to 42 states.
Although this declaration does not bear the signature of the United States, India, China or Mexico, the new countries include Indonesia, Vietnam, South Korea, Egypt, Spain, Nepal, Chile, Ukraine and Poland, the latter responsible for 96 percent of the coal mined in the European Union in 2020 and 43% of the total coal consumption in the EU bloc.
Untapped potential
Luis Pedrero Ojeda, doctor in Physics from the Max Planck Institutes in Germany, expert in solar energy and professor at the Tecnológico de Monterrey campus Toluca, explained the current panorama of Mexico regarding the use of renewable energy in the country.
According to this expert, Mexico has the potential to use clean energies due to its geographical conditions since they make it a country with great potential to take advantage, specifically, of two of these energy sources, solar and wind, to produce electricity. .
“More solar parks can be built because in the center and north of the country there is very high solar radiation. Per year we have over 95% of solar radiation, that is, there are almost no cloudy days, “he assured in his keynote speech at the Monterrey Tech.” If we continue as we do now, in the future we will be very bad. We have to reach a minimum the figures that Mexico agreed in the Paris Agreement ”.
It should be remembered that the Paris Agreement was signed during the twenty-first Conference of the Parties (COP21) in 2015 and 195 countries signed in order to limit the increase in the planet’s temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
In this agreement, Mexico committed that 35% of its energy would come from renewable sources by 2024 and 43% by 2030.
Today, according to the Ministry of Energy (Sener) in the country there is infrastructure to generate renewable energy in 31%, but it does not mean that this is the percentage that is generated continuously.
“It is said that there is intermittency because, for example, a solar cell does not receive sun at night, so it stops producing energy,” explained Luis Pedrero, “to solve this, there are energy storage systems, but they are not very developed. It is necessary to continue improving them to use renewable energies 24 hours a day ”.
But the president of the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC) for Latin America, Ramón Fiestas, explained to El Economista that last year Mexico fell from second to fourth place in new wind power generation infrastructure.
And it is that in 2020 4,673 megawatts of wind power were installed in Latin America, of which 49.5% corresponded to Brazil; 21.7% to Argentina; 14.6% to Chile, and Mexico only paid with 12.3% of this infrastructure, when for six years our country contributed at least 25% of the new capacity, always behind the first place that has been Brazil with an annual average of 50% .
“We see an environment that is adverse to us because the political will has completely changed to support wind power and the energy transition,” said the expert from the international body.
The energy reform initiative to modify the Constitution, returning to the CFE the 54% preponderance of power generation regardless of the source from which it produces, has jeopardized the energy transition goals.
This is due to the fact that, according to data from the Ministry of Energy, it seems difficult to reach 35% clean energy by 2025, including even nuclear generation, efficient natural gas generation processes and the CFE’s large hydroelectric plant, which They are not considered renewable energy due to their externalities, but they are included within the goals in the country.
In addition to the fact that the federal government today has as a priority the financial rescue of the CFE, putting the fight against climate change in second place, according to experts on the subject.
karol.garcia@eleconomista.mx
