The General Law on Climate Change, the Law on Energy Transition, and Mexico’s commitments on Climate Change under the Paris Agreement, oblige our country to generate at least 35% of its electricity with clean energy by 2024. The government of President López has ostensibly trampled on such imperatives. It promotes the generation of electricity with fossil fuels, essentially fuel oil, in obsolete, polluting and expensive CFE power plants. In this way, it tries to dispose of the fuel oil that is increasingly being produced by the PEMEX refineries, which are increasingly inefficient, without reconfiguration, and loaded with Maya heavy oil with a high sulfur content. The finances of PEMEX and the treasury suffer even more, as well as the health of the population exposed to the pollutants emitted by the burning of fuel oil in thermoelectric plants: sulfur oxides (Sox) and inhalable particles smaller than 2.5 microns (PM2.5). In fact, in an unusually irrational way, President López has preferred to squander 6 billion dollars in the purchase from Iberdrola of 12 power plants, 11 of them that operate with gas in combined cycles, close to obsolescence. This absurd expense does not increase the electricity generation capacity in Mexico by a single kilowatt; it only alleviates and relieves the finances of Iberdrola, a company, by the way, a world leader in clean energy: onshore wind, offshore wind, hydroelectric, nuclear, and in the production of green hydrogen from electrolysis (separation ) of water into hydrogen and oxygen. Despite this, Iberdrola has been permanently harassed by the regime. If President López had invested those 6 billion pesos in power generation plants with clean energy, a good part of the deficit that Mexico has in it could have been covered. Let’s see.
In 2021, 97 Terawatts/hour of clean energy were generated in Mexico (including the large hydroelectric plants built in the 1960s and 1970s), which represents 29% of the total, which was 329 Terawatts/hour. To comply with our country’s international commitments and with Mexican laws, by 2024, 125 Terawatts/hour of clean energy would have to be generated, which would represent 35% of the total generated. This means that an additional 28 Terawatt hours of clean energy would be required for the coming year, which (after some simple calculations) means about 11 thousand Megawatts (MW) of additional installed capacity of clean energy electricity generation. On average, one MW of power generation capacity carries a cost of 1 million dollars, so the required investment would amount to 11 billion dollars. Under the 2013 Energy Reform, and according to the trends up to 2018, all of this would have been invested by private sector companies (including Iberdrola). The State would not have had to disburse a single peso to achieve the goal of 35% clean electricity generation by 2024; except, of course, in transmission lines, in which the State has a natural monopoly. By the way, clean energy is the cheapest available today in a good number of countries. In the last electricity auction held in 2017, clean energy broke cost records, offering CFE a price of USD 20 per Megawatt/hour, the lowest ever recorded in the world. But, President López canceled the energy auctions so that the CFE power plants could burn the fuel oil that is massively produced by the PEMEX refineries, at extremely high costs, which all taxpayers and users of electrical energy pay for, and in the face of brutal environmental impacts from air pollution caused by burning fuel oil. Assuming that it was rational for the State to invest in power plants, with the 6 billion dollars that President López paid Iberdrola for its obsolescent plants, the clean energy generation capacity in Mexico could have been increased by 6 thousand MW (wind, solar, geothermal) and, therefore, covered 55% of the investment needs in clean energy, to comply with Mexican laws and international commitments on climate change. The purchase of Iberdrola’s power plants is a flagrant fraud against the Nation, the health of the population, and the planet’s climate.
@g_quadri
