The share of clean energy in effective electricity generation in the country has increased from less than 20% to more than 25% in a decade, and it is expected that it will reach 35% at the end of this administration. And of this participation, 55% corresponds to hydroelectric, geothermal and nuclear, technologies operated by the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE), whose participation has fallen from the level of almost 100% it had in 2011, after the increase in the participation of renewable, photovoltaic and wind energy from private companies in the country.
According to data from the Ministry of Energy, which after three years updated its Electricity Generation section of the Energy Information System (SIE) adding the effective annual volume of generation by technology for 2018, 2019 and 2020 (without monthly data on these years or 2021), in 2020 300,844 gigawatts hours of energy were generated in the country, by counting steam, gas combined cycles, turbogas, internal combustion, dual and coal, in the fossil part, and geothermal, nuclear, hydroelectric, wind and photovoltaic as clean energy. Of this volume, 25% corresponded to clean energy.
Of this, 56% corresponded to nuclear, geothermal and hydroelectric energy, almost exclusively generated by the CFE. With a volume of 42,255 megawatt hours, CFE’s clean generation through these sources has fallen 19% in a decade, since it was 52,391 megawatt hours in 2011 and represented 99% of the country’s clean generation.
This decrease is due to the incursion of renewable, wind and solar generation, which almost entirely corresponds to private ones and that last year was 33,229 megawatt hours, when a decade ago it was only 2,399 megawatt hours, with which It has increased more than 10 times and less than 1%, last year it represented more than 44% of the country’s clean energy.
Meanwhile, the Secretary of Energy, Rocío Nahle, assured this Monday that Mexico will reach the goal of 35% clean energy in its generation basket by 2024, since in fact it will close 2021 with just over 30% of effective generation of electricity in the country through sources that do not emit greenhouse gases.
Thus, 2021 will close with a clean energy production of almost 91,000 gigawatts hours, since according to the indicators presented by the Minister of Energy before the legislature, as of October 2021 there had been a total of 298,910 gigawatts hours of which the 30.36% will have been contributed through clean sources.
It should be remembered that the following year after the approval of the Energy Transition Law, in 2017, the national share of clean energy was 21.5% of the national total, and that it has increased by more than nine percentage points in four years, thanks to the new particularly renewable installations, since only the photovoltaic generation went from less than 1% to 5.3% of participation in this period.
Mexico considers clean technologies that are specifically renewable, such as wind, geothermal, photovoltaic and wind and others that do not emit greenhouse gases, but have negative social and environmental externalities, such as large hydroelectric, nuclear and the steam component of the combined cycles.
The growth in generation through clean sources corresponds to the installation of private electricity capacity since, of the three auctions for the sale of long-term energy to the country’s suppliers, which was practically the CFE for its basic supply (in addition to a small component of Iberdrola and Cemex), 86% of the contracted capacity has come into operation, which is 6,800 megawatts of renewable energy almost entirely, mainly wind and photovoltaic.
The CFE, for its part, plans to increase its clean generation capacity with projects such as the construction of a photovoltaic park in Puerto Peñasco, Sonora, which will have a generation capacity of 420 megawatts and to which almost 10,000 million pesos will be allocated. In addition, it executes an investment of almost 20,000 million pesos to expand some 246 megawatts to the existing 12,371 megawatts of hydroelectric generation capacity, with the modernization of 14 plants.
Reference-www.eleconomista.com.mx