Mexico was forced to accelerate its shift to renewable energy after the Russian invasion of Ukraine last year caused a sharp rise in global energy costs, Mexico’s Foreign Relations Secretary Marcelo Ebrard said Thursday night. .
Ebrard made the comments after taking dozens of foreign diplomats to see a massive new solar power project near the US border.
“Mexico is making a great effort because it did not consider that (the switch to renewable energy and electric vehicles) would be so fast,” Ebrard said. Decisions made by the United States and Mexico last year to invest heavily in those areas “didn’t seem so close before the war.”
“We also have to change the focus,” he said. “It has to go faster.”
ADVANCED MEXICO-USA DRUG TUNNEL US HAD SOLAR PANELS, VENTILATION, RAILWAY SYSTEM
In April, Mexico plans to turn on the first phase of a massive solar power project near a beach town popular with tourists traveling from the United States.
Once completed, the entire $1.6 billion project will have a generating capacity of 1,000 megawatts, enough to power some 500,000 homes. It will be the largest solar project built by Mexico’s state power company.
Aerial view of the northern border state of Sonora, where the state electricity company is building the largest solar plant in all of Latin America, in Puerto Peñasco, Sonora state, Mexico, on February 2, 2023. Mexico is pushing to speed up its step to renewable energy energy in the country.
(Raquel Cunha/Pool Photo via AP)
In Puerto Peñasco, near the top of the Gulf of California and on the Arizona border, rows of solar panels that tilt with the passing sun run toward the horizon looming over the sand. The project will eventually cover 5,000 acres in the transition where the desert flattens out between the rugged brown mountains and the blue sea.
The Federal Electricity Commission plans to have the first 120 megawatts of the project operational by April 29, Juan Antonio Fernández, the commission’s strategic planning director, said Thursday.
MEXICAN ARCHITECT WANTS TO CONVERT THE TIJUANA RIVER CANAL INTO A SOLAR ENERGY FARM
Sonora Gov. Alfonso Durazo, who once served as a cabinet minister alongside Ebrard before running for state office, argued that Sonora should be the center of Mexico’s electric vehicle production. In addition to the coming online of solar power (in total, 5 gigawatts of solar capacity is planned for the state), Sonora has the largest lithium deposits in the country, a key component in batteries for electric vehicles.
Ebrard said the plan represented a “new development model.”
“We’re not going to be able to do that in all the states at the same time,” he said. “But we have to show that this idea can be real and it’s not an illusion.”
The shift towards renewable energy is at odds with other priorities of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
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The president has invested heavily in propping up the struggling state oil company. He is building a big new oil refinery. And he has promoted legislation that gives advantages to the state electricity company over private energy production, which in many cases was cleaner. He is the subject of a trade dispute with the United States and Canada.
Ebrard is one of several people seeking the presidential nomination of López Obrador’s Morena party for the 2024 national elections.
