A Costa Rican bach
Costa Rica is proving itself to be a renewable energy darling use after it was confirmed that for a 75 day period, the entire country’s energy grid was powered by clean energy.
The Central American country is well-known as an idyllic place to live in the region given that it is also widely recognised as being one of the few countries in the world without a free-standing army, but now it can add that it’s one of the most environmentally-friendly countries on the planet as well.
The news came after the Costa Rican Electricity Institute (ICE) issued a press release confirming the milestone which they put the high output of energy down to heavy rainfall through the beginning of this year which powered the country’s four hydroelectric power plants, according to Science Alert.
The country have also been sure to have almost all of the major sources of renewable energy also including geothermal, solar, wind and biomass energy generators.
Given that Costa Rica is a relatively small country at a size of 51,000 sq km and home to 4.8m people, its energy demands would not be of the same calibre of some of the larger countries, but does raise interesting side-by-side comparisons with Ireland given our relatively similar size and population, despite our own slow development of renewable energy.
Ireland has had its own brief flutters with weather events causing surges in renewable energy use, most notably in October of last year when the Irish Wind Energy Association (IWEA) claimed that 50pc of our energy demands between 17-19 October were met due to the windy conditions that weekend.
Costa Rican beach image via Shutterstock
