WWF Says Renewable Energy Gives Everyone a Share of Development – LAHT

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The various sources of renewable energy represent an opportunity for Latin America to have its development shared by the entire population, and would particularly favor the more than 20 million people living in regions without electricity, according to World Wildlife Fund expert Tabare Arroyo.

Arroyo, the NGO’s adviser on the economy and energy, visited Asuncion this week for a series of meetings with officials of the Paraguayan administration.

In an interview with EFE, the expert noted that “renewable energy promotes a decentralized energy production model that permits the existence of ‘prosumers’: people who produce the energy they consume.”

The WWF representative said that, in line with the Sustainable Development Goals proposed by the United Nations, many developing economies are looking to use 100 percent renewable energy by the year 2050.

The region’s leading renewable-energy-producing countries, according to the WWF, are led by Costa Rica, which in 2013 generated 87 percent of its energy from renewable sources, and by Uruguay, which in 2012 became the country in the region with the highest percentage of its GDP invested in this sector.

According to Arroyo, Latin America and the Caribbean boast a “great potential” for producing renewable energy, which could allow some countries to forget about an economic model based on fossil fuels like oil and coal.

Arroyo added, however, that these countries still have a “high dependency” on those greenhouse-gas-producing fuels, above all in the transportation sector, 80 percent of which depends on oil, and in homes without electricity, where residents use wood or coal for cooking and heating their dwellings.

In spite of that, the WWF believes the transition to an energy matrix based on renewables is already becoming evident, for example, in the declining cost of solar energy and the growing investment and the creation of new jobs in the sector.

The region of Latin America and the Caribbean has the potential to provide 20 times the demand for electricity projected for 2050 using renewable energy, without any further dependence on fossil fuels, which could make it the leader in the sector, according to WWF data.

The region currently generates 7 percent of the world’s electricity, and almost 65 percent of this electricity comes from renewable sources, mainly from hydroelectric plants.