For nearly a week, the country of 10 million met customer needs with wind, hydro and solar — a test run for operating the grid without fossil fuels.
For nearly a week, the country of 10 million met customer needs with wind, hydro and solar — a test run for operating the grid without fossil fuels.
This story was originally published by Canary Media.
One recent autumn afternoon, I watched the Atlantic gusts collide with the cliffs that rise above Nazaré, Portugal. Rain pelted down, and the world-renowned swells rose into walls of water that even the most death-defying surfers reach only via Jet Ski. For me, this looked like a rained-out, late-season beach getaway, but for the sliver of Iberia that is Portugal, it looked like a bright future. That weekend, the nation of 10 million ran on nothing but wind, solar and hydropower.
As it turned out, those rainy, blustery days were just a warmup. Portugal produced more than enough renewable power to serve all its customers for six straight days, from October 31 to November 6.
“The gas plants were there, waiting to dispatch energy, should it be needed. It was not, because the wind was blowing; it was raining a lot,” said Hugo Costa, who oversees Portugal for EDP Renewables, the renewables arm of the state utility, which was privatized in 2012. “And we were producing with a positive impact to the consumers because the prices have dropped dramatically, almost to zero.”
To hit Paris Agreement climate goals by 2050, nations need to run their grids without carbon emissions not just for three or six days, but year-round. A handful of countries already do this, thanks to generous endowments of hydropower, largely developed well before the climate crisis drove investment decisions for power plants. Others score highly on carbon-free power thanks to big fleets of nuclear plants.
Portugal falls into a different, more relatable bucket: It started its decarbonization journey with some legacy hydropower, but no nuclear capacity nor plans to build any. That meant it had to figure out how to cut fossil fuel use by maximizing new renewables.
How did Portugal make this happen? It committed to building renewables early and often, pledging a 2050 deadline for net-zero carbon emissions in 2016, several years before the European Union as a whole found the conviction to take that step. Portugal’s last coal plants shut down in 2022, leaving (imported) fossil gas as the backstop for on-demand power.
“The key conclusion, in my opinion, is that it shows that the Portuguese grid is prepared for very high shares of renewable electricity and for its expected variation: We were able to manage both the sharp increase of hydro and wind production, and also the return to a lower share of renewables, when natural-gas power plants were requested again to supply some of the country’s demand,” said Miguel Prado, who covers Portugal’s energy sector for Expresso newspaper.
The task ahead for Portugal’s grid decarbonization is to reduce and ultimately eliminate the number of hours when the country needs to burn gas to keep the lights on. Leaders want gas generation, which made up 21 percent of electricity consumption from January through October, to end completely by 2040.
To reach its climate goals, Portugal has focused on diversification of renewable resources; instead of depending primarily on wind, water, or sun, it blends each into the portfolio and finds ways to make them more complementary. The country’s power companies are now chasing major additional offshore wind opportunities, expanding solar installations and repowering older onshore wind projects to get more out of the best locations.
This can not be real. People told me for years that solar does not work at night and wind is not always blowing, so renewables can not work and I am a "librul fag". How can a country work in 5 days of renewables then? Maybe then it is also not true, that wind turbines give people cancer? Preposterous! Maybe these people lied. Or are just dumb. Or both.
Well, portuguese here, that record period can be mostly attributed to hydropower as we’ve seen unusually high levels of rainfall over that period that we haven’t seen in a while. And because we decided to try and ditch stuff like coal in a rush, there was an uncomfortable while where our grid very much depended on electricity imports, which don’t come from clean sources, we just outsourced the problem.
Renewable capacity is still growing however, but with climate change making droughts here more frequent, the main hydrofallback may not become as much of an option
Yeah, in the chart for the whole year to end of October ( here ) you can see that wind generation was actually more than hydro and a little over 25% of generation came from fossil fuels, probably because the country spent most of the year under official Draught conditions, something which Global Warming Models indicate will only become worse.
The whole bet on Hydro generation which dates back to the Fascist days and was carried on under Democracy is getting near its expiry date.
Actually almost 7% of generation this year was "Pumping" (chart here for the year to the end of October, pumping being "Bombagem") which I believe accounts for water that gets pumped up to the upper reservoirs of dams when there is excess electricity on the grid and is latter used to generate electricity when needed.
So yeah, hydro (both the setup with an upper reservoir and a lower one where you can spend excess power pumping water up and the more common hydro setup without a lower reservoirs where the hydro dam can simply use less water and generate less during high points in the cycle for other renewables) probably makes a huge difference here.
Hydro was about 1/3 of renewable generation this year to the end of October, 22.22% of total (though the total also includes 6.81% "pumping", which I believe is the energy pumped up to dam reservoirs when there is excess electricity in the grid).
(Source here, top chart, in PT but most can be guessed from EN and for the rest "Eólica" means "From Wind", "Carvão" means "Coal" and "Bombagem" means "Pumping").
It actually use to be a higher fraction but Portugal spent most of the year officially under Draught conditions, severe Draught in some places, and Global Warming Models indicate it's only going to get worse.
I have mixed feelings about it. It is great that this is possible, but then having an article celebrating 6 days implies that doing this a year round will be a much harder challenge.
Maybe not. Cause it means that sustained highs are really close to that magical 100% and hopefully the longer term averages not too far behind, maybe in the 60s, 70s (pulling these figures out of my butt btw), so maybe it’s not that far