A few years ago almost two thousand bold households on the Danish island of Bornholm joined a surge pricing experiment run by their electricity utility. It was supposed to empower the utility and consumers with a simple, direct market (“The Smartest, Greenest Grid,”IEEE Spectrum, April 2013).
Men died in gun battles over the installation of windmills in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, three years ago. Opponents argued that energy companies misled them and that community leaders rented out collective lands without consulting everyone they should have. Today, protests continue, but the growth of wind farms and other renewables seems assured: Mexico boasts almost 2 gigawatts of installed wind power capacity and plans to install perhaps another 12 GW by 2022. All that clean energy is a big change for this country, which is the world’s ninth-biggest oil producer and perhaps the 11th-biggest emitter of carbon dioxide. Continue reading Mexico’s Renewables Revolution Creates Tension→
Over the last twenty years, Mexico’s electricity sector has shifted from being almost 100 percent state-owned and centralized to about one quarter privately generated. This summer, the Mexican government signed into law energy and electricity grid reforms that will accelerate the decentralization of its electricity production (See “Mexico Opens Its Grid to Competition.”). By the end of this year, a new agency should have a regulatory map available for power producers large and small, said Edgar López, renewable energies director at Mexico’s Energy Regulatory Commission (CRE) at a conference in Mexico City last month. Continue reading Power Production Decentralizes in Mexico→
Mexico reopened its energy market to outside producers in August for the first time in more than 75 years. Until now, private companies could only serve as contractors to the national hydrocarbon or electricity monopolies.
Mexicans formerly took pride in keeping a major natural resource in national hands. Pemex, the state petroleum monopoly, provided almost a third of federal revenues. Yet Pemex’s production began dropping in the mid-1990s. In 2013, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) predicted (PDF) that by 2025 Mexican oil production would plunge by more than 50 percent from 2010 levels, despite the presence of the equivalent of 450 billion barrels of oil in Mexico, on par with Saudi Arabia’s resources. On August 25, citing the reforms, the EIA predicted a turnaround in the decline over the next few years and a return to growth by 2025. Mexico is now on the verge of an oil and gas boom. Continue reading Mexico Is Poised for Energy Boom→
Journalist covering global development by way of science and technology.
