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Latin America, Caribbean could save US$36B through energy efficiency investments
SAO PAULO – Latin American and Caribbean countries could save an estimated US$36 billion over the next decade by adopting affordable and available technologies to improve their energy efficiency, according to a report released Monday by the Inter-American Development Bank.
The report estimates the productivity of energy use and compares prices for residential electricity, gasoline and diesel fuel in 24 of the region’s countries. It was announced yesterday by IDB President Luis Alberto Moreno at a conference here on “Energy Efficiency and Competitiveness” co-hosted by the IDB and the governments of Germany and Switzerland.
IDB President Luis Alberto Moreno
“There is no doubt that if we adopt the right policies, within a decade it would be possible for one third of the energy required by Latin America’s electricity sector to come from efficiency measures,” IDB President Luis Alberto Moreno said at the conference.
“This would be the equivalent of reducing electricity consumption by 10 percent by the end of the next decade, with investments that would be modest in contrast to the cost of building the infrastructure necessary to generate, transmit and distribute the same amount of electricity,” Moreno added.
The IDB report offers estimates, for each country, of the cost of achieving a 10 percent reduction in the electricity use expected by 2018. It also offers a hypothetical “business as usual” scenario in which countries do not improve their energy efficiency and must instead meeting growing demand by building additional gas-powered electricity plants.
According to the report, Latin American and Caribbean countries would need to invest roughly US$17 billion in compact fluorescent lighting, efficient motors and other measures to achieve an 10 percent reduction in electricity consumption by 2018. That savings would amount to approximately 143,000 gigawatt hours.
But if the region does not become more energy efficient, it will need to build an estimated 328 open cycle gas-powered electricity plants (250MW each) just to produce the same 143,000 gigawatt hours of electricity, according to the report. At today’s prices, using extremely conservative assumptions, it would cost around US$53 billion to build those plants.
Citing the experience of industrialized countries that have satisfied up to half of their energy demand growth through efficiency measures over the last two decades, the report concludes that efficiency may be Latin America’s largest untapped “source” of energy —one that costs roughly two thirds less than simply expanding energy production.
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