Wind energy in venezuela

“BARRIERS FOR WIND ENERGY IN VENEZUELA, GENERAL DESCRIPTION OF THE ACTUAL SITUATION”

BY CESAR PEREZ

RESEARCH SKILL MODULE

MSc RENEWABLE ENERGY MANAGEMENT

UNIVERSITY OF FREIBUG, MARCH 2010

ABSTRACT

Nowadays Venezuela produce 75% of their electricity trough Hydropower plants built decades ago. This high dependency in one source to produce energy hasdisadvantages that weren’t so evident until months ago. Because of the droughts that have been taking place in South America new sources of energy were being looked for and most of the countries began this journey years ago but Venezuela didn’t and now the country is consuming more electricity than it produce resulting in an electricity crisis. Trough the paper it will be discuss what difficulties doface Venezuela to develop Wind Energy as an alternative source and also what positive side effects to the way of thinking of the Venezuelan people result from this electricity crisis, such as a more ecological thinking and a need of new forms of energies like Renewable Energy

KEYWORDS: Wind Venezuela, Wind situation in Venezuela, Barriers, Difficulties.

INTRODUCTION

Trough the last decadesome authors had publish their investigations on Wind Potential in the Caribbean (Wright 2001) and in Venezuela (Sangronis 2009) but none have explain why in a country with such great potential in Renewable Energies too little or nothing have been done to exploit them. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the reader the difficulties that Venezuela is facing to develop wind energy projects,barriers such as companies and private property expropriations, the currency control and the need of the actual government to gain power and recognition in the world by fighting capitalism. These barriers have made Venezuela to get to a point where for several reasons the country is living an energy crisis. But the crisis might bring.

Most of the people think that Venezuela because is a petrocountry has no problems with electricity but is it the real situation? Is wind power necessary in the country? Why the energy crisis has affected more Venezuela than any other neighbor country?

Following these questions and gathering personal knowledge and experience the author had tried to summarize the actual situation of the country and checking if Venezuela fulfills what according to Ensslin2001 is important or necessary for a Wind Project.

VENEZUELA AND WIND ENERGY

Humans have used the power of wind starting thousands of years ago to propel sailboats, for natural ventilation in building and Windmills that have been used for irrigation pumping and for milling grain since the 7th century AD. But since the oil crisis that occur in 1972 countries that strongly rely on oil had tolook for other sourced of energy. They start making changes in their Energy Policies to reduce oil dependency and use Renewable Energies to cover the deficit. Since then Renewable Energies have had a tremendous increase, especially Wind Energy. In this field Denmark was one of the pioneers because the wind potential and in the present almost 20 % of their electricity comes from this source. But itdoesn’t help only to produce electricity but to produce a clean, 0 CO2 emission energy. Around The World in the year 2009 the top countries producing Renewable Energies were (Shahan, 2010):

1) US: 35.2 GW of installed capacity (up from 25.2 GW in 2008)
2) Germany: 25.8 GW of installed capacity (up from 23.9 GW in 2008)
3) China: 25.1 GW of installed capacity (up from 12.1 GW in2008)
4) Spain: 19.1 GW of installed capacity (up from 16.7 GW in 2008)
5) India: 10.9 GW of installed Capacity (up from 9.7 GW in 2008)
As we can see two of the countries are developing countries, the reason it is that those governments invested in this source of energies because they needed to do it. But many governments haven’t had this need so far; and this is the case of Venezuela....