Well hydropower is the "easy" level of the decarbonization game. So it's not really surprising first countries to leave fossil fuels behind are also countries with mountains and rivers.

Or, more charitably: use the Strangler Fig method to modernize your systems, and start with low-hanging fruit.

Well yes, hydro and geothermal are the easiest (and earliest perfected) renewable sources to provide consistent base load. It would be odd if the first countries to achieve fully renewable power weren’t making use of those technologies.

Other countries will have to be more reliant on interconnects, diverse renewable mixes and batteries. Luckily this is now almost always cheaper and more secure than fossil fuels and the trend lines point towards that continuing to be more and more true over time.

I guess somewhat of a fun fact: Albania has rented(!) two floating(!) oil-powered power plants near the city of Vlöre that are there in case of emergency. The last time they were really needed was in 2022 (if I remember correctly), but these days they're not turned on any more than they need to be to make sure they're operating properly. That very expensive backup system is basically the only non-renewable source in the whole country, and most of the time it's just sitting there doing nothing.

Being powered almost entirely by hydro means that the system is highly susceptible to droughts, so then they either have to spin up those oil plants from time to time or import electricity from abroad. I think it's also worth pointing out that nothing really changed because of climate change, the decision to rely on hydro was made in the 90s. The country used to have its own oil power plant that it heavily relied on before that decision, which slowly produced less and less until it was shut down for good in 2007. Some images of it from 2019: https://www.oneman-onemap.com/en/2019/06/26/the-abandoned-po...

fun fact for Paraguay: the Itaipu Dam is one of the largest in the world located between Brazil and Paraguay, where each country gets 50% of the production. But 50% of that production for Paraguay, a country of 7 millions inhabitants, means that it cannot consume that much, so it's essentially reselling that energy to Brazil, a country with 30x more inhabitants. Paraguay only uses about 1/3 of its share (and thus resells 2/3 to Brazil).

And have either a small population or a very low per-person energy budget.

But: 7 isn't the number that matters, what matters is that next year it will be 8 or 9. That would be worth documenting.

wasnt New Zealand also already far up beyond 90% renewable electricity a couple of years ago?

I'm wondering how this picture holds up if we include cooking and water heating.

I think they missed Uruguay which is a similar case. They have also traditionally benefitted from a hydro able to cover 80-90% most of their needs but they made a concerted effort to fill the entire remaining gap with wind and solar.

For some it's an eye-opening experience when they compare the states which are the most vocal about going solar and have a look onto the solar map of the world.

Or then they talk about how some countries have miraculous levels of an energy independence and social services and then look at their total population.

There are a few countries just below as well like Norway with about 98% renewables in 2024 [1]. The gas power plant is mostly up north powering the gas compressors that fill LNG ships headed for Europe and the coal I think is for Svalbard but that mine/plant closed in 2025 [2].

[1] https://www.nve.no/energi/energisystem/energibruk/stroemdekl...

[2] https://www.nrk.no/tromsogfinnmark/norges-siste-kullgruve-pa...

They are blessed with all three of hydro, geothermal, and wind.

And cars. Lots of diesel in Albania.

Recent video by someone from Puerto Rico comparing their island's renewables with Uruguay and interviewing the guy in charge of their renewables rollout:

https://youtu.be/TsmlyqZJOug

Tbf, solar has gotten so much more effective/cost efficient in the last 12-24 months that it's beating pretty much everything aside from hydro in the cost efficiency department at this point - including (most of) northern Europe and Canada.

Most data you find will be using data that's massively out of date and be off by at least 2x though...

I had another facepalm moment when I read about EU planning to go nuclear again. That would've been amazing and smart in 2015 - but now? Yeah, it's dumb af. And that's coming from a German living at the northern end of the country.

>at such as scale

Not to downplay the positive steps that are being taken but we are conveniently skipping over the denominator here at least in the case of Ethiopia and DRC who both have a grid that is only serving their full population at a fraction of the level needed to make this story one about geographical lotteries and abundance instead of one about poverty preventing them from access to the traditional carbon power generating routes to server the rest of the population.

Well, when geothermal stops being renewable there will be no humans around to need energy generation.

You are still technically correct, which is the best kind of correct.

But if we follow that rationale, in a long enough timeline, solar and wind is also not renewable.

Or just trains

And this is an expected problem with renewables that can be engineered around. It's unlikely the whole world has a drought at once during a calm night, so developing ways to transmit power long distances will be important.

And it means that it has been oil free since the 70's.

Brazil, a continental country, has more than 80% of its energy from renewables

Also, many of these countries are tropical or subtropical, with optimal conditions for solar energy year round. Nepal and Bhutan are relatively far from equator, but have many days of unobstructed sunshine.

Why geothermal is not renewable? Earth is not going to cool its magma soon enough

At present, those tandem cells are still experimental. Nobody is manufacturing them on gigawatt scale like for other solar cell technologies.

Having a continent-wide draught (or cold winter or other weather effect) is rather common though. Just a few years back Europe had a massive issue where draught caused both drop of hydro production and cooling for French nukes, causing energy prices to spike.

Which absolutely should be done, but having energy sovereignty is never a bad thing.

Oil free for electricity generation. The media in my country (Finland) also likes to brag about 90+% fossil-free electricity generation. But electricity is under half (30%?40%?) and the rest of that energy isn't fossil-free.

Finland has electricified 40% of primary energy which is pretty much world leading (Sweden and Norway are 50%). European average is 19%.

Largest chunk left is transport which can mostly be electrified now. Industrial and home heat too. There are hard to electrify sections in both but overall it's fairly obvious what to do next.

And the easy parts eliminate 3 or 4 units of primary energy for every one they replace, so even 40% primary energy is way over 50% toward the finish line of electrifying all the useful stuff.

I think it's also an interesting question as to whether countries that use a lot of electricity have lower per kWh prices because they spread the fixed costs further.

Can’t speak for large scale sites with abundant volcanic activity… But for residential geothermal the bore hole has a lifetime based on how much ground water there is and how active usage it sees.

This is because using it cools the hole slowly and after a few decades (depending on how quickly ground water can dissipate heat gradient) a new hole need to be drilled a distance away.

“Technically”

Well... if you go to the web site , they seem to welcome very large orders. Just not mine or yours.

Might be experimental and unavailable, but just for small orders? Come on ...

Can we cycle the holes? Use one while the other one is warming back up.

Then no power source is "technically" renewable.

Time for a group buy

Then solar and wind aren't technically renewable either, because the sun is going to eventually consume the earth and explode.

Geothermal is renewable.

A lot of hydroelectric depends on snow pack and glacier runoff that is being adversely affected by global warming. Solar and wind are the only robust hedges against a warm up that might ultimately severely curtail river flow.

We have a lot of uranium and nuclear is fairly renewable at least in the span of a few centuries. The waste issue is a problem.

About 20% of this is residual heat from planetary accretion; the remainder is attributed to past and current radioactive decay of naturally occurring isotopes.

Most of the radiogenic heating in the Earth results from the decay of the daughter nuclei in the decay chains of uranium-238 and thorium-232, and potassium-40.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiogenic_heating

Potassium is more or less distributed in the body (especially in soft tissues) following intake of foods. A 70-kg man contains about 126 g of potassium (0.18%), most of that is located in muscles. The daily consumption of potassium is approximately 2.5 grams. Hence the concentration of potassium-40 is nearly stable in all persons at a level of about 55 Bq/kg (3850 Bq in total), which corresponds to the annual effective dose of 0.2 mSv.

https://www.nuclear-power.com/nuclear-engineering/radiation-...

However much solar or wind energy we use, the Sun will last exactly as long. This is not a matter of scale. Even if we were to build a photovoltaic Dyson sphere around the Sun, it would have the same lifespan.

That is not the case for geothermal. It could in theory be cooled down if exploited at a massive scale.

Saying geothermal is not renewable is not an indictment nor a criticism. Geothermal is great and we should use it more. It's just technically not renewable, but that doesn't matter.

In comparison, averaged over the year and the day, the Earth's atmosphere receives 340 W/m^2 from the Sun.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_irradiance#On_Earth's_su...

If it goes down, what happens to all the buildings using geo/earth heat with these probe heads to collect the energy?

Does this effect occur in lets say 10-20 years or is this longterm like 50y+?

No, not quite. Geothermal is powered by the accumulated heat stored in rocks from fission Uranium and other heavy atoms deep in the Earth (and other phenomena).

Geothermal hotspots do not reheat by fission or otherwise at the same speed that we extract their energy (if they did we'd be in trouble if we weren't extracting it!).

As I mentioned in another comment, build a Dyson sphere of solar panels around the Sun and it will last just as long. Build an all-Earth geothermal plant and the heat will be depleted.

And a new star will eventually form from the debris, so "renewable" is a function of time scale.

Thanks for that context.

By that definition, hydroelectric dams are not a renewable energy source for most of the year.

At a certain point there won’t be enough heat recovered from the geothermal side of the loop to generate steam on the process side of the loop and power generation will cease. I’m not smart enough to calculate how long that will take, however. I think you could still use the geothermal energy at a lower temperature for district heating and cooling, but a mechanical engineer would be more qualified to answer that.

How long would it take for the heat to be depleted? Humans have only managed to drill something like 12km into the earth because it gets too hot to go further.

And after a hundred generations of this there will be no fusible material left. We can extract energy from rotating black holes until they stop, and then the universe is dead.

If it were possible to access all of the Earth's stored geothermal energy, probably a very, very, very long time.

But if we're open to applying a quantitative timescale threshold to the thought experiment, at which we can argue geothermal is renewable, that raises the question for nuclear. If we could access all fissile uranium and thorium on Earth, how long would it take for us to deplete its stored energy? Does that mean nuclear energy is renewable?

So solar energy is renewable over a human lifetime, not renewable over a stellar lifetime, renewable over a stellar formation cycle, not renewable over the lifetime of a universe, and renewable if universes turn out to be cyclical. And all but the first are pendantry in the context of renewable energy conversations.