Costa Rica has been 100% powered by renewable energy for the first quarter of the year and this may continue. This is fantastic for the central american country as it has been making huge strides as a an eco-friendly tourist destination. You can see the beginnings of the country’s environmental focus when we looked at it back in 2006.
Costa Rica continues to impress!
This year has been a pretty special one for Costa Rica — for the first quarter, the country’s grid has required absolutely no fossil fuels to run, the state-run power supplier the Costa Rican Electricity Institute (ICE) has announced. It relied almost entirely on four hydropower plants, the reservoirs of which were filled by fortunate heavy rainfall. The remaining power needs were met by wind, solar and geothermal plants.
Costa Rica, although small at just 4.87 million people, joins a growing number of countries relying on renewable energy. Iceland’s electricity consumption is almost 100 percent covered by renewable energy. Paraguay and Brazil share the Itaipú hydroelectric dam, which serves almost 100 percent of Paraguay’s needs and around 85 percent of Brazil’s. Lesotho, Norway and Albania also rely on renewable energy, with a longer list of countries well on the way of getting there.