Like other regions of the world, Latin America faces an enormous challenge in switching from fossil fuels to renewable energy. But there’s a twist. Many experts say it must at the same time reduce its dependence on a longtime source of renewable power, too—hydroelectricity.

The region prides itself on having one of the cleanest electric-power systems in the world, with 64% of its electricity coming from renewable sources. By far the most important renewable energy is hydropower, which provides about 45% of the region’s electricity. Despite the widespread acceptance of hydropower, there have long been critical voices. Philip Fearnside, Research Professor in the Department of Ecology at the National Institute of Amazonian Research (INPA) in Manaus, Brazil, says that, contrary to widespread belief, dams cannot be considered “clean energy” as they produce significant amounts of carbon dioxide and methane.

Flavio Montiel, the Brazil Program Manager of International Rivers, an environmental and human rights organization, points out that, even before they are built, they cause considerable environmental damage. “The mere announcement of the construction of a hydroelectric dam triggers an increase in deforestation, through the illegal occupation of public lands and the invasion of conservation units and Indigenous lands,” he says. Once they’re operating, Montiel adds, “the dams substantially alter the natural hydrological flow of rivers,” with “very harmful impacts on aquatic and terrestrial fauna, since they impede the migratory and reproductive flow of numerous species of fish.”

Governments shrugged off the environmental and social criticisms and pushed ahead with hydropower. David Purkey, Latin America regional director for the Stockholm Environment Institute, says: “Hydropower was the low-hanging fruit.

Latin America is a mountainous region, a comparatively wet region, with big rivers, with lots of flow. It was the efficient choice.” However, over the last few years rising global temperatures, sharply fluctuating rainfall patterns, melting glaciers, and the increasing frequency of droughts and floods have wreaked havoc with the power generated by the dams. Hydropower’s increasing unreliability has strengthened the pushback against plans for large-scale dams.

“The droughts are leading to a rethink of the belief that we can depend on hydropower,” says Purkey. “Anybody who was relying on water resources and the stability of water resources  got tricked by climate change.”

The problems have been particularly severe this year in South America because of widespread drought. (See "Drought drives down region’s hydropower production" —EcoAméricas, October 2024.)

In Brazil, hydroelectric-dam reservoir levels in October were 49% below normal. Ecuador, reliant on hydropower for about 75% of its electricity, has been severely affected, experiencing power cuts of up to 14 hours a day. Colombia and Peru have also faced problems. Countries have been forced to increase their use of fossil-fuel-fired plants, which has boosted their greenhouse-gas output, damaging the region’s green credentials.

Various options are under discussion. Top of the pack is solar energy, which is growing fast. Currently, solar power accounts for just 3-4% of power generation in Latin America and the Caribbean, according to data from Ember, an energy think tank headquartered in London, England. But with plans underway for 250 projects representing 19,429 megawatts of installed capacity, the region’s solar-power supply is primed to jump by at least 70%, according to the Global Energy Monitor, a nonprofit, San Francisco-based energy-information clearinghouse.

The trend has seen some countries reach new milestones. In November, Brazil’s operational solar photovoltaic capacity surpassed 50 gigawatts, the nonprofit Brazilian Solar Energy Association (Absolar) announced, making the country the sixth in the world to reach that level along with China, Germany, India, Japan, and the United States. The government, meanwhile, reported that 119 solar plants were built in Brazil from January to October of this year. Investment in wind power is increasing too, but at a slower pace. When it comes to conducting an energy transition, Chile ranks among the region’s leaders. That’s thanks to an important economic reason in addition to environmental ones: with no coal, gas, or oil of its own, it is keen to end its dependence on imported fuels. Says Purkey: “Chile, the country with least fossil resources, has been quite ambitious. It has rapidly expanded wind and solar. It is an example of what can be done.”

Chile has set itself notably ambitious goals—to generate 70% of its electric power from renewable sources, to stop using coal completely by 2040, and to become carbon-neutral by 2050. Symbolic of its commitment is US$1 billion, 210-megawatt Cerro Dominador, a combined photovoltaic and concentrated solar-power plant in the country’s Atacama Desert, among the driest places on earth. Cerro Dominador features an innovative system of energy storage—a capability that most solar plants lack, leaving them unable to respond to energy demand when the sun isn’t shining. It addresses this by making use of solar salts extracted from the Atacama Desert. The plant melts the salt, heating it to over 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit and holding it in hot-storage tanks. For several days, the resulting thermal energy can be used to generate electricity as needed by powering a steam turbine. The concentrated-power portion of the plant features a series of mirrors that track the sun on two axes, focusing the solar radiation on a receiver atop a tower, where the heat is transferred to the molten salts.

Chile’s biggest clean-power ambition, however, is to become an early leader in the production of green hydrogen, which is made by using electricity from renewable energy to electrolyze water and separate hydrogen from oxygen. (See "Chile and Brazil look to lead in green hydrogen" and "Chilean green-hydrogen industry advocate discusses progress to date" —EcoAméricas, January 2023.) Government officials hope that by 2050 green-hydrogen exports will bring in US$30 billion annually, thereby becoming one of the country’s biggest foreign-exchange earners.

At the moment, the global energy industry sees green hydrogen as too costly and thus uncompetitive; but Rodrigo Palma, director of the nonprofit Solar Energy Research Center in Chile (SERC Chile), says ways will be found to reduce costs, as was the case with photovoltaic energy.

While environmentalists broadly welcome Latin America’s move toward renewables, some caution that clean power is being falsely portrayed as a means of enabling economic growth without incurring environmental costs. They argue that when it comes to the energy conversion, the environment could pay a heavy price—pointing out, for instance, that compared to fossil-fuel power, renewables such as wind and solar energy require far more minerals and, thus, mining. Such is the pace of the switch to renewables, they say, that regulators will be hard-pressed to implement adequate green safeguards in time.

The world is set to add over 5,500 gigawatts of renewable capacity from 2024 to 2030, says the International Energy Agency (IEA), an autonomous intergovernmental research organization. That’s almost three times the increase from 2017 to 2023, says the IEA’s Renewables 2024 report. “Renewables are moving faster than national governments can set targets,” says IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol.

Key renewables require a wide range of minerals, including nickel, graphite, copper, rare earths, lithium and cobalt. Desperate to satisfy the escalating demand, companies are competing to extract these minerals in ever more inaccessible areas. And mining them, a process that depends heavily on fossil fuels, produces large quantities of greenhouse gases. An article published in MIT’s Technology Review in January 2023 estimated that mining for renewable energy would produce 29 gigatons of carbon dioxide during the period 2023-2050, turning the sector into a significant emitter of greenhouse gases.

“Paradoxically, extracting this large amount of raw materials [for renewables] will require the development of new mines with a larger overall environmental footprint,” according to the nonprofit Intergovernmental Forum on Mining, Minerals, Metals and Sustainable Development (IGF). Such projects are raising growing concerns about local impacts. For instance, lithium mining in southwestern Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni, the world’s largest salt flat, has been blamed for adding enormously to the already considerable water demands of the region’s copper mines, depleting the supplies available to local communities.

Purkey asserts there is no way mining can be made sustainable. “We’re physically extracting resources from the ecosystem, and the resources are limited,” he explains. “But I do think there are ways for mining to be made more responsible.

We don’t have to assume that the same commodity-driven, lowest cost of production, extractive model we’ve used so far must be the model we use in this energy transition. If there is some consciousness about climate change—and maybe the recent [U.S. presidential] election suggests there isn’t—then it may be the right moment to talk about other transitions that are needed.”

These, he says, would involve developing more coherent, integrated systems so that, for example, when the wind is blowing, electricity from turbines pumps water back into reservoirs so hydroelectric dams can run more efficiently during a water shortage. “There needs to be a lot of thinking around smart grids, batteries, industrial transitions, corporate transitions,” Purkey says. “Without this, there will be hell—damaged communities, damaged ecosystems. Latin America could be in a position of leadership, particularly as other countries are turning their back on the issue.”

Advocates of renewables say critics are disregarding the benefits. They claim that the minerals needed to build solar plants and wind farms are only required once and that, unlike fossil fuels, renewables produce energy year after year. The solar industry argues solar panels have an expected lifespan of 25 to 30 years, with well-maintained panels potentially lasting far longer. This has not been the case so far. Solar installations, many supplied by China, are often of poor quality and only last a few years. This has contributed to concern about fast-accumulating e-waste in the Global South. Even if the panels don’t break down, the speed at which technology is evolving militates against use of the panels for their full lifespan. A 2021 article in the Harvard Business Review forecasted that after ten years or fewer, rational, solar users will decide to throw out their panels and install newer ones capable of producing more energy and bringing them bigger incomes.

Nor are solar panels being recycled in significant amounts. The panels are both delicate and bulky, requiring specialized labor to recycle, something consumers have little financial incentive to underwrite. While panels contain small amounts of valuable materials such as silver, they are mostly made of glass, an extremely low-value material. And the US$20-30 cost of recycling a panel compares to the estimated US$1-2 price of burying it in a landfill.

Not all Latin countries appear as eager to switch to renewables as Chile. Latin America only obtains about 4% of its energy from coal, a fraction of the world average of 27%. But it acquires about two-thirds from oil and natural gas, which will not be easy to phase out given their use not only in power generation, but also to fuel vehicles and industrial plant boilers.

Oil and gas lock-in

Argentina is a case in point. Although the government is committed in principle to increasing the share of renewables in its electricity, it also is tapping into the country’s enormous shale oil and gas reserves as a bridging strategy. In January 2023, then-Economy Minister Sergio Massa, said that exports of gas, lithium and other minerals offered Argentina a “phenomenal growth opportunity” and that the export earnings from these minerals would allow the country to service its foreign debt in future years. But Purkey says this strategy is dangerous, since it makes a country reliant on fossil fuel: “Gas as a transition fuel is a very attractive narrative. The resources are available. The technology is proven. But it creates a lot of lock-in around fossil-fuel production.”

Another form of energy that will play a role in the transition is nuclear. Nuclear power is already in use in Brazil, Argentina and Mexico. It has advantages: it is a proven technology, its recent safety record is good, and building a nuclear station doesn’t require as much mineral mining as solar and wind. It could serve as a vital source of base-load power production, acting as a complement to the variable peak, or peak-load, power produced by wind and solar energy. But countries in Latin America that do not yet use nuclear power must source both nuclear technology and fuel, not to mention find the vast financing required. The most likely supplier would be the United States, which would mean a potentially lengthy process of negotiating non-proliferation agreements and securing other international regulatory approvals.

Most analysts are not expecting solar and wind power to supply most of the region’s electricity in the foreseeable future. One study forecasts hydropower will remain the leading source of electricity in Latin America for many years. Says Arturo Alarcón, a senior energy specialist in the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB): “[Latin America has] 200 gigawatts of hydroelectric power in the system” and it makes no sense to lose it. Still, the switch to solar and wind seems set to continue. Their share in Latin America’s electricity generation is expected to double by 2030, reaching 40% by 2050.

Societal change

The importance of the switch to renewables is by no means minimized by those who argue that more attention must be paid to the environmental and social impacts of expanded minerals mining. Says journalist Vince Beiser, author of a new book on the toll being taken by mining spurred by the energy conversion and by internet technology: “The biggest threat we face is climate change. It’s caused by burning fossil fuels. So we have to switch to renewables.”

But Beiser argues that when it comes to climate and biodiversity protection, switching to renewables will not be enough. Society must change, too, he says. “The number one way we as individuals, as consumers, can address problems caused by our energy needs, including the race for critical metals, is this: don’t buy a car,” Beiser says. “Not even an electric one. Cars are by far the most energy and resource-intensive thing most of us own aside from our homes.”

Flavio Montiel goes further: “The history of human development up until now has been based on an anthropocentric vision, where homo sapiens is the center and nature is a mere resource to be exploited without limits. If humanity wants to continue to exist, it will have to adopt a model with a biocentric vision, where nature is the center and we are just a part of it, on which we depend. Otherwise, humanity will be wiped off the planet for bad behavior.”