Sunday, May 08, 2022

Who is leading the charge on wind and solar power?

An excellent infographic from Visual Capitalist's Elements website, based on data from Ember, gives a great quick overview of which countries are leading the charge on solar and wind renewable energy, and some of the results are perhaps surprising.

Denmark is top of the pile - no surprise there - generating 51.9% of their electricity from solar and wind sources. But No. 2 is Uruguay with 46.7%, which, to me anyway, IS a surprise. The rest of the top ten is made up of: Luxembourg (43.4%), Lithuania (36.9%), Spain (32.9%), Ireland (32.9%), Portugal (31.5%), Germany (28.8%), Greece (28.7%), and the UK (25.2%).

You'll notice that Canada does not feature in this list (no real surprise there). Granted, Canada has a big contribution from other renewable sources, principally hydro-electricity, but on solar and wind is is doing abysmally, with just 6.6% of its electricity produced by those two sources combined. This puts us on the same level as Peru, South Africa and Somalia (and New Zealand, as it happens, another surprise to me). Even the USA does twice as well, with 13.1% coming from solar and wind.

At the other end of the scale, it's no big surprise to find Russia (0.5%) and Belarus (1%), as well as many big oil producers like Venezuela (0.1%), Nigeria (0.1%), Iran (0.3%), Saudi Arabia (0.5%) and Malaysia (0.7%), as well as many less developed countries in Africa, Asia and Oceania.

No comments:

Post a Comment